The first IIT Council meeting on Monday, under the chairmanship of human resource development

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minister Kapil Sibal, is expected to frame a multi-pronged policy, including introducing scholarships and reducing fee to attract more foreign students at post-graduate level in the institutes.

The council will also decide on allowing IITs to create extra seats for foreign students at the PG level to ensure that youth from other countries take part in research and development in a big way. At present, foreign students have to pay a much higher amount of money than their Indian counterparts as fee.

There are two different fee structures – one for the students of Saarc countries and another for the students of other nations. However, both the fee regimes entail more spending by foreign students than what the Indian students pay, an IIT director said.

“IITs attract students from developing countries, who find it difficult to pay the huge amount and develop a cold feet on coming here,” he added.

The council will ratify the revised pay structure of the IIT faculty. The new pay structure had attracted criticism from the IIT faculty, which went on a hunger strike on September 25.

Sibal met representatives of IIT faculty that was demanding the removal of 40 per cent cap on promotion of professors to senior grade. The minister told them that the government “guidelines are just norms and there can be flexibility in exceptional cases”.

The council will also discuss giving more autonomy to the elite institutes. Sibal has said that the government is ready to give more autonomy if the IITs come up with a vision plan for next five years and achieve them. It will also discuss the issue of the possible impact of foreign institutes which will be allowed under the proposed Foreign Education Providers Bill.

The elite institutes are apprehensive that they may lose their faculty to the foreign institutes, which may offer fat salaries to the teachers. The council will deliberate on how to attract faculty to join the IITs. These institutes are facing a shortage of faculty up to 30 per cent.

Meanwhile, a high-level committee, appointed by the government to review the functioning of deemed universities, is likely to suggest withdrawal of status from a few institutions for serious shortcomings in their facilities and poor standard of faculty.