All-out efforts are on to commission the Indian Institute of Technology at Dharwad irrespective of the recent plea of Chief Minister Siddaramaiah to the Union government to shift it to the backward district of Raichur.
The attempt of the Chief Minister to dissuade the Union Ministry of Human Resources from establishing the IIT at Dharwad has not gone down well with both the Union government and the Bharatiya Janata Party leave alone a section of the Karnataka Congress leadership. The attempt to derive a political mileage at the cost of the State’s interest has attracted criticism.
Karnataka has been granted an IIT, a request of the State that had been pending with the Union government for over three decades. The IIT at Dharwad will be the 20th in the country with the first having been established at Kharagpur in West Bengal in 1950.
Irrespective of the attempt by the Chief Minister to shift the IIT to Raichur, all-out efforts are presently under way to get the premier technological institute to start functioning from the coming academic year. A makeshift building — the premises of the Water and Land Management Institute — has been identified along with another parcel of land measuring nearly 600 acres for the construction of a new state-of-art building, which is likely to be ready in about five years.
The Union government will bear the cost of the project while the State government will provide the requisite land.
It should be remembered that the government of Jagadish Shettar had held a Cabinet meeting at Kalaburagi in 2012 and had then recommended to the Centre to establish an IIT in Raichur. Prior to this, then Union Minister for Human Resources, the late S.R. Bommai (in the United Front government of H.D. Deve Gowda) had made a serious attempt for the sanction of an IIT at Dharwad.
The Union Minister for Finance, Arun Jaitley, had announced in the budget that Karnataka had been granted an IIT following a long pending plea. If the Chief Minister was serious at that point of time, then he should have recommended that the IIT should come up at Raichur. Instead, the government recommended 3 possible locations — Mysuru, Dharwad and Raichur.
A high-level Central committee after an inspection of the three districts opined that the IIT should come up at Dharwad. The other places that were originally contemplated included Bengaluru, Hassan, Shivamogga, and Belagavi, but the State government in its proposal shortlisted three places at Raichur, Dharwad and Mysuru.
It is obvious that the State BJP leaders have had their say in the Centre pitching for Dharwad given the fact that top BJP leaders like H.N. Ananth Kumar, Pralhad Joshi and Jagadish Shettar hail from the region.
The incumbent government should note that the location of the IIT — at Dharwad or Raichur — should not make any difference to it or to the ruling Congress. An IIT for Karnataka was long overdue and the government of Siddaramaiah should be happy that it is being established during its rule in the State.
(The writer is Resident Representative, The Hindu Centre for Politics and Public Policy, Bengaluru.)
