5 yrs on, IIT-Goa awaits land for permanent campus
NEW DELHI: Five years since it was opened through a bill amendment, the Indian Institute of Technology in Goa (IIT-Goa), which functions from Farmagudi, is awaiting land allotment for the construction of a permanent campus, officials familiar with the developments said.
Between 2015-2016, six new IITs were established in Tirupati, Palakkad, Dharwad, Bhilai, Goa and Jammu through the Institutes of Technology (Amendment) Bill, 2016, to provide more opportunities to students who aspire to join the country’s premier engineering institutes. While the other five IITs have either already shifted to their permanent campuses or are in the process, IIT-Goa continues to share the campus with a staterun engineering college in Farmagudi. The delay has not only affected the day-to-day functioning of the institution but also created uncertainty among faculty members and students, the officials cited above said. “It has become a long wait for the institute now. The delay has created a sense of uncertainty among faculty members. In the last two years, we have seen that students with lower all-India ranking are opting for IIT-Goa,” director BK Mishra said.
Initially, officials said, the land was identified in Lolium part of south Goa in 2016 but the plan failed to materialise after residents protested against it. Later in 2019, a land in Sanguem was identified but not finalised “in view of various difficulties encountered in procuring/ acquiring and transferring the land to IIT-Goa”.
In 2020, a third site was identified in Shel-Melalui and Guleli villages. The state government, however, in January this year scrapped the project following continuous protests. The villagers claimed that their cultivation would be affected by the project.
Several faculty members told HT that the absence of a permanent campus was depriving the Goa unit of several opportunities. “There are a number of research and funding schemes of the central government but for that, you need space to apply for it. Because we have no permanent campus, we are not getting any such project,” associate professor Sharad Sinha said.
A senior official at the ministry, who did not wish to be named, said, “We had been regularly sending reminders to the state government to expedite the process of allotting the land.”
Goa revenue secretary Sanjay Kumar, a member of a committee that was constituted by the state to allocate land for the project, said, “We are searching for suitable land for the project. We expect something to come up in the next few months.”