New Delhi: The Council members of all 23 Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) are meeting with human resource development minister Prakash Javadekar on Tuesday to chart out their next growth path including planning a strategy to break into the top 100 global university rankings.

As part of the IIT Council meeting, the IITs and the HRD ministry will discuss how such institutes can expand themselves in terms of more enrolment of students, better research and industry-academia collaborations for product developments.

“There will be a new scheme to help older IITs break into the global league of universities. As part of the proposed plan, IITs may be provided both financial and logistical help to achieve the target over the next few years," an official of the HRD ministry said, who declined to be named.

Currently, only one IIT has made it to top 200 in one of the global university rankings. IIT-Delhi was ranked 179 and Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Bangalore was ranked 147 in the Quacquarelli Symonds’ (QS) list of top 200 universities globally last year. QS is a UK-based global raking agency.

The IITs will discuss about increasing their overall enrolment to 100,000 from 72,000 over the next few years. The engineering schools will discuss with the ministry on how to fill up their teaching staff vacancies which is between 10% to 30% of the sanctioned strength and how to accommodate an increased number of students in their campuses with limited physical infrastructure, an IIT professor said who is part of the IIT Council, the highest decision-making body of the IITs. He too decline to be named.

The ministry may ask the established IITs to help the national assessment and accreditation council in scaling up the accreditation process for colleges and universities in the country.

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