It’s clearer than the waters melting from the ice in the Himalayas that the Goa government has inexplicably moved at a snail’s pace to facilitate the setting up of a permanent campus for the Indian Institute of Technology which was allotted to Goa by Modi 1.0 in 2014-15.
Five years after that announcement which was hailed as a big profile boost for Goa by the then Chief Minister, the first set of engineers are slated to graduate from IIT Goa at the end of the current academic year. Yet, IIT Goa continues to operate from a temporary campus accommodated in the sprawling Goa Engineering College (GEC) at Farmagudi.
And, well beyond the several deadlines set for it by the Union Human Resources Development Ministry, the State government is yet to honour the first of its commitments - handing over land to set up the permanent campus for IIT Goa, complete with a compound wall built along the site’s periphery.
Education Secretary Neela Mohanan, IAS, told The Goan: “We have written to the MHRD to depute their Site Selection Committee to inspect the site selected by the State government.”
Mohanan indicated that the latest request to the MHRD to send its panel to finalise the location of the campus, was dispatched after the August 30 decision of the cabinet of Chief Minister Pramod Sawant, which finally lent a sense of permanency to the State’s effort to earmark a site for the IIT.
If and when the MHRD does send it, this will not be the first time that the team will conduct a site inspection to “finalise” the site for IIT Goa. The site approved by the cabinet in Guleli, Sattari, is the fourth such offered to IIT Goa by the State government.
Meanwhile, the first batch of students commenced their academic pursuit at IIT Goa in 2016, and the saga of the Goa government’s search for land to house the permanent campus dates back to 2014, when a site in Dhargalim-Pernem was first selected. However, there were some portions within that site which belonged to private individuals and so the MHRD rejected it.
The State government then chose a new site at Loliem in Canacona, which incidentally, got the nod from the three-member site selection team of the MHRD. But even before the first square meter of this site could be handed over, local people opposed the project there on grounds that it would harm the ecology of the area.
Then, a third site was selected in Cotali-Sanguem in 2016-17. But here in Sanguem too, the land was never handed over to IIT as locals in the area were opposing it. And now, in August 2019, a new site is chosen in Guleli, Sattari and sealed, at least from the State’s point of view, with a cabinet decision.
A senior Cabinet Minister told The Goan, that at the cabinet meeting, the only consideration for choosing Guleli, was that the land has to be handed over without any encumbarances.
“If not, Goa was to lose out on having a permanent IIT campus in Goa because they (MHRD) have waited for too long to start working on building their permanent campus here,” the Cabinet Minister said.
Further, the minister added that as far as the site in Sanguem was concerned, some families residing there were objecting to the proposal as they claimed the land belonged to them.
“The matter would have ended up in court and remained unresolved for years,” the Cabinet Minister added.
On ground zero, at the temporary campus in Farmagudi, IIT Goa is hosting over 450 students who are pursuing undergraduate and postgraduate programs and are making do with studying at a ‘temporary campus’ hosted by the Goa Engineering College.
Currently, the intake capacity is 40 seats in B.Tech Computer Science and Engineering (CSE). Another 40 students have filled the seats in BTech Electrical Engineering (EE), 45 in BTech Mechanical Engineering (Mech) and 25 in BTech Mathematics and Computing (MC).
Back in 2016, when IIT Goa began functioning academically, the sanctioned intake was 30 students in each stream - B.Tech in CSE, EE and Mech. BTech in MC is a new program the institution has begun in August this year.
The undergraduate intake limit is decided every year by the Joint Seat Allocation Authority (JOSAA) of the MHRD.
As for the MTech programs, IIT-Goa has them in CSE, EE and Mech with a sanctioned intake of 10 regular students and two sponsored students.
PhD programs are also offered in the three branches of engineering as well as in Mathematics, Chemistry, Physics, Humanities and Social Sciences. The intake limits for the PhD programs however vary as per requirement.
And, as the current academic year will end, the first batch of ‘Goa IITians’ will have graduated, yet there’s no sign, the August 30 cabinet notwithstanding, that Goa will have delivered its part - handing over a fenced site to set up the campus.
