After months of politics and bureaucratic wrangling with various state governments, the Union HRD Ministry has finally selected the states which will get new IITs and IIMs. While six new IIMs will be set up in Jammu & Kashmir, Tamil Nadu, Haryana, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Uttarakhand, four new IITs will be located in Orissa, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Punjab.

The exact locations will be decided after the state governments identify 500 acres of contiguous land for setting up the campus.

Today’s announcement comes almost six months after Prime Minister Manmohan Singh asked the HRD Ministry to finalise the locations of the new IITs, IIMs and central universities that are a part of the eleventh Five-Year Plan. As per the Plan, eight new IITs and seven IIMs will be set up. The government had earlier announced four new IITs in Andhra Pradesh, Rajasthan, Bihar and Himachal Pradesh, and an IIM at Shillong.

Speaking to newspersons today, Union HRD Minister Arjun Singh said the Prime Minister had approved the location of the new institutes. The government also proposes to convert the Institute of Technology at the Banaras Hindu University into an IIT, he said.

Besides new IITs and IIMs, 14 world-class central universities will be set up in Pune, Kolkata, Coimbatore, Mysore, Visakhapatnam, Gandhinagar, Jaipur, Patna, Bhopal, Kochi, Amritsar, Bhubaneswar, Greater Noida and Guwahati.

Moreover, 16 central universities will be set up in states which do not have one at present. These are Bihar, Jharkhand, Orissa, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Punjab, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Jammu and Kashmir, Karnataka, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Gujarat, Rajasthan and Goa.

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