Elite IITs go bankrupt, no salary for Mumbai staff

FINANCIAL CRUNCH? The HRD ministry has not increased the annual grants to IITs since 2002.

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Mumbai: They count among the world's best engineering institutes, but the IITs are in a fix.

In a recent development, all the seven institutes have written to the Union HRD Minister saying that they are on the verge of bankruptcy — so much so that IIT-Bombay does not even have enough money to pay its staff members their salary for the month of January.

The institutes are now trying to get the ministry to pay their electricity bills on time.

The fund crunch is so severe, say institute staffers, that the elite colleges are not even being able to meet the expenses that they incur on a daily basis.

The directors say that the resource crunch is nothing new and that they have been withdrawing money from their corpus for a long time now. However, they insist that they cannot keep on doing the same and that they need the financial aid from the HRD Ministry now to keep afloat.

They have written to a Standing Committee headed by HRD Minister Arjun Singh to release Rs 20 crore per year per IIT so that they can both meet their expenses as well as return the money that have been withdrawing from their corpus — something which they set aside for long-term use.

The IITs have always depended on Government patronage for their existence, but recently, with the Government releasing less and less funds, they have had to turn to alumni to meet their requirements.

The HRD Ministry has not increased grants to the institute for the last five years now.