Seven months after union finance minister Arun Jaitley, while presenting the Union Budget 2015-16, announced that an Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) would be established in Karnataka, a civil war of words has broken out in this southern state (pop. 64.5 million). After Jaitley’s announcement, the Congress government in the state recommended that the BJP-led NDA government at the Centre pick one of three cities — Raichur, Hubballi-Dharwad or Mysuru — as the site of Karnataka’s first Central government-funded IIT. In early September, the Union human resource development (HRD) ministry selected Hubbali-Dharwad, which also hosts Karnatak University (estb. 1949), as the site of the new IIT. However, even as Hubbali-Dharwad’s academic community was celebrating the good news, the state’s chief minister M. Siddaramaiah changed his mind and recommended Raichur, a small town (pop. 240,000) in Karnataka’s predominantly agrarian northeast, as a more suitable location. “I will be grateful if you kindly reconsider the decision taken on setting up of the IIT at Hubbali-Dharwad and instead convey the approval of the Government of India for setting up the institute at Raichur,” said Siddaramaiah in a September 21 letter to Union HRD minister Smriti Irani. In the letter he explained that establishing the new IIT in Raichur will contribute to the socio-economic development of this arid and under-developed region of the state. The chief minister’s volte face was undoubtedly prompted by strong protests in Raichur about the choice of Hubbali-Dharwad as the location of Karnataka’s first IIT, and representations by MLAs of the Hyderabad-Karnataka region led by the state medical education minister Sharan Prakash Patil. They argued that Raichur — named one of the 250 most backward districts (out of a total of 640) in the country, and conferred special status under Article 371 (J) of the Constitution — should have been chosen as the location for the new IIT. Further pressure to change the location of Karnataka’s first IIT was exerted by an all-party delegation that included Congress leader in the Lok Sabha Mallikarjun Kharge and BJP’s Rajya Sabha member Basavaraja Patil Sedam, which met Irani and pleaded the cause of Raichur. Angry citizens of Hubbali-Dharwad observed a bandh (general strike) on September 23 in protest. The subject of establishing an IIT in Karnataka — a hub of engineering education which boasts 187 engineering colleges and the country’s largest number of IT (information technology) companies — has a long history. In 1998, a committee headed by former ISRO chairman U.R. Rao recommended the establishment of an IIT in Hubbali-Dharwad on the ground that the twin cities have an academic tradition (Karnatak University) and supportive infrastructure. This provoked a war of words between the state’s major political parties. Former prime minister H.D. Deve Gowda demanded the IIT be set up in Hassan, his Lok Sabha constituency, while former Union law minister M. Veerappa Moily wanted it in Chikkaballapur, also the birthplace of Karnataka’s most eminent administrator and engineer, Sir M. Visvesvaraya. In the new millennium, chief minister B.S. Yeddyurappa had pressed the…
