During the rule of the BJP-led NDA (National Democratic Alliance) government at the Centre (1999-2004) when BJP ideologue and hardliner Dr. Murli Manohar Joshi was the Union minister for human resource development (HRD), he made a determined attack on the administrative and financial autonomy of the country’s (then) seven Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs). Inevitably, EducationWorld (estb.1999) exposed the Union government and Joshi’s moves and machinations to this end. We present excerpts from a cover story (January 2004) written at a time when the IITs (and IIMs) were in clear danger of suffering severe erosion of their academic and administrative autonomy.

“Increasingly officers of the IAS (Indian Administrative Service) and bureaucrats of the Union ministry of human resource development are being inducted into the governing boards of the seven IITs in Mumbai, Kharagpur, Delhi, Kanpur, Chennai, Guwahati and Roorkee. Following a leakage of test papers of the pan-India IIT Joint Entrance Examination (IIT-JEE) in 1997 written by Plus Two school-leavers, control of the Union HRD ministry currently presided over by the imperious BJP hardliner Dr. Murli Manohar  Joshi, is gradually being extended over the IITs … which are an endangered species

• Earlier this year (2003), the HRD ministry issued a controversial fiat mandating the routing of all endowments upon the country’s institutions of higher education through the Bharat Shiksha Kosh (BSK), an education trust promoted by the ministry in 2002. Since the tradition of endowing one’s alma mater is foreign to most Indians and peculiar to the IITs, quite obviously the ministry mandate had the IITs in its sights. “The initiative of BSK was taken with a view to garner support from every quarter, including the common man for spreading education. I have always been saying that education is the primary responsibility of the State. During the past 50 years the donations received by the IITs, including those from their alumni, have been less than Rs.150 crore… whereas the Central government sanctions nearly Rs.750 crore annually to the IITs. Let me make it clear that the country has enough funds to run its institutes of national importance,” says Joshi.

• Moreover in a populist but damaging move to keep the IITs hooked on government funding and patronage, Joshi has insisted upon freezing their tuition fees at a mere Rs.30,000 per year.”

Providentially, before Joshi’s plan to transform the IITs into pliant handmaidens of the HRD ministry came to fruition, against all expectations of political pundits and pollsters, the BJP was routed in the general election of April-May 2004 and Dr. Joshi lost his seat in the Lok Sabha.