NEW DELHI: Human Resource Development minister Smriti Irani is pushing hard for funds to quickly set up at least eight new IITs , and has already met the finance minister for funds, after bureaucrats said it would be a huge challenge to find money, land and faculty for this.Irani, who wants speedy action to implement BJP’s poll promises, is also seeking funds for other priority projects such as a Central university for Himalayan Technology and a national e-library, and has taken up the matter with Finance Minister Arun Jaitley , government sources said.Kerala, Karnataka, Jharkhand, Uttarakhand, Goa, Sikkim and Chhattisgarh – the states that do not have an IIT — would benefit from Irani’s proposals. Seemandhra has already been promised an IIT as part of the Andhra Pradesh bifurcation package. Irani did not respond to ET’s queries.The number of IITs in the country was doubled to 16 in 2009 but the new ones are facing challenges such as a fund crunch. About Rs 12,500 crore were allocated for the IITs in the 12th Five-year Plan (2012-17). Of this a little over Rs 6,000 crore is set aside for the eight IITs set up in 2009.However, given rising costs, the fund requirement for new IITs, many of which are yet to operate from their permanent campuses, has more than doubled to Rs 14,000 crore.HRD officials argued that in the current state of the economy , embarking on an expensive exercise of setting up as eight new IITs would not be feasible. They pointed out that the new IITs are facing several problems as some of them were operating out of make-shift campuses as land was not available. In some cases construction and infrastructure development has been delayed.An official said that Irani’s attention was drawn to the fact that the Planning Commission had already turned down the proposal to set up an IIT in Palakkad, Kerala, even though Shashi Tharoor , then minister of state for HRD, represented the state in the Lok Sabha.The plan panel had made it clear that given the huge liability from the proactive expansion in the Eleventh Plan period, the focus had to be on consolidation. The ministry has also been trying to address the problem of faculty crunch faced by IITs through a series of policy measures such as increasing the retirement age and encouraging retired professors to teach on a contract basis.