New Delhi: The three new Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) coming up in Bihar, Rajasthan and Andhra Pradesh will not only teach engineering, but also design and creative arts, management, health sciences, humanities and social sciences.

The Human Resource Development (HRD) Ministry has already given a go-ahead signal to all the three new IITs to start functioning right from this academic year from their temporary campuses.

Earlier, in a Planning Commission representatives' meeting, it was proposed that in order to bring IITs at par with all top universities across the globe, sufficient time should be given to develop the requisite infrastructure.

However, Director of IIT, Kanpur pointed out that most of the existing IITs had started their classes from rented premises. He pointed out that quality of the faculty is more important than classrooms for making an institute a world-class institution.

The committee had set at an outlay of Rs.760 crore each over six years in the three IITs for various routine services. In fact, the Expenditure Finance Committee (EFC) has only approved creation of the post of director and the registrar in each institute along with minimum support staff. The HRD ministry would submit a separate proposal to EFC for support staff.

As per the decision, each institute will initially have an intake capacity of 200 students, but when fully developed, the institutes will increase their students' strength subsequently.

Each IIT will have a total student strength of about 3,000 students with approximately 2,000 of them in B.Tech, 500 in M.Tech, 400 in Ph.D and 100 as post-doctoral fellows.

The plan panel suggests that each of the new IITs will be guided by one of the existing IITs to enable them to attain high standards of teaching and research.

Every IIT will have faculty strength of 262 at the end of the seventh year of operation and will also maintain the teacher-student ratio of 1:9, as in the case of other IITs.