Report lands Arjun in secular trap

Union HRD Minister Arjun Singh8217;s pathological dislike for anything that bears his predecessor Murli Manohar Joshi8217;s stamp may cost...

Union HRD Minister Arjun Singh8217;s pathological dislike for anything that bears his predecessor Murli Manohar Joshi8217;s stamp may cost Kolkata and its suburbs two new IITs.

Also losing out will be two engineering colleges in Andhra Pradesh, one in Kerala, the technological institute in Benares Hindu University campus and the Aligarh Muslim University8217;s engineering college. All these colleges could have got the IIT label in an upgradation exercise.

In its report submitted earlier this month, the S K Joshi committee, appointed by Murli Manohar Joshi, suggested that these seven existing engineering colleges could be upgraded to IIT status. Now the HRD Ministry, known to be allergic to everything initiated by the earlier BJP regime, is wondering whether it should pay any attention to the report at all.

The seven institutes recommended by the committee are: Bengal Engineering College, Shibpur near Kolkata in Howrah, Jadavpur Engineering College in Jadavpur University Kolkata, Institute of Technology in Benares Hindu University, Zakir Hussain College of Engineering and Technology in Aligarh Muslim University, University College of Technology and University College of Engineering in Osmania University Hyderabad, Andhra University College of Engineering in Vishakhapatnam and Cochin University of Science and Technology in Kerala.

If he had his way, Arjun Singh would have put this report in cold storage. But what has caused problems for him are the very names and locations of some of the recommended institutions. As one bureaucrat pointed out, the S K Joshi committee may have been appointed by the BJP regime but his recommendations 8216;8216;benefit UPA constituencies8217;8217;.

The HRD Minister will find it difficult to inform his Bengal comrades that he is turning down a recommendation which says Bengal is ready to run two more IITs apart from the one already functioning in Kharagpur. His comrades in Kerala will also be upset because his own partymen from the State have petitioned him in the past about at least one IIT.

Andhra Chief Minister Y S R Reddy is desperate to prove that he is continuing with the regime of technological development that his predecessor, N Chandrababu Naidu, claimed to have ushered in. He would not be amused if Singh decided to sit on these recommendations indefinitely.

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Aligarh Muslim University is Arjun Singh8217;s own constituency, especially since the minister has been going out of the way to woo minorities.

But the bureaucrats are not showing primary interest in the report. Some say that going by regional considerations, its acceptance could mean disaster. A senior IAS officer said what the ministry could do was accept two or three recommendations and simultaneously suggest some greenfield IIT projects, and not just upgrade existing technological institutes.

It was former Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee who had announced the setting up of five new IITs to add to the existing seven, in his Independence Day speech of 2003. Subsequently, the then HRD Minister, Joshi, had convinced him that it would be difficult to create new IITs. Instead, the better technological institutes with the right infrastructure could be upgraded.

Accordingly, this committee under the chairmanship of Dr S K Joshi, a former director general of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, was set up. But its report was considerably delayed, being handed over to the ministry only recently.