PANAJI
As the State government continues to hunt for suitable land to set up a permanent campus of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Goa, the premier engineering institute is set to miss out on the additional infrastructure grants from the Union Ministry of Education.
Set up in July 2016, IIT Goa campus is temporarily housed in Goa Engineering College at Farmagudi and since then, in the absence of a permanent facility, the institute has already missed out on crucial research and infrastructure grants from the Centre.
Highly placed sources confirmed that the State government is currently contemplating awarding around 9.50 lakh sq mts of land, belonging to the Revenue Department, but leased out to Sanjivani Sugar factory, for IIT campus.
“The government has decided to take back around 2 lakh sq mts of land, allocated to International Law College. But the issue is to provide alternate land to college. The government decided to shift it to Mayem, but there is public opposition,” sources said.
Sources said that if the State fails to identify land for the permanent facility, IIT may lose out to the additional infrastructure grants, as announced in the Union Budget, for one of the new IITs in the country, created after 2014.
“In the past also, the institute was not able to secure some of the large research grants precisely because it couldn’t provide the space necessary to create the related laboratory infrastructure. These grants are meant to create an ecosystem involving nearby educational institutions in research activities,” sources said.
Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman in her Budget 2025-26 announced that total number of students in 23 IITs has increased 100 per cent, from 65,000 to 1.35 lakh in the past 10 years, and that additional infrastructure will be created in the five IITs started after 2014 to facilitate education for 6,500 more students.
“The institute is not able to go for expansion due to space constraint and it has to manage within the space made available by GEC,” sources said.
Since 2016, the State has made several attempts to allocate land for IIT. The recent was at Rivona in Sanguem taluka, where despite the Selection Committee of the Union Ministry granting its node to the 10.5 lakh sq mts of land, the government failed to pursue it due to lack of documentation.
The government had first identified a site in Canacona taluka but was dropped due to opposition. The proposal was later shifted to Melauli, Sattari, where locals organised a sustained protest against it. The government was forced to drop the site, citing “people’s sentiments.
The government then considered shifting the project to Cotarli in Sanguem but then the site was rejected by the Ministry amid public outcry.
