New Delhi — In what has come as a shock to the board of the elite Indian Institutes of Technology, the Indian government has directed it to open six new institutes this year instead of the scheduled three, even as the seven existing institutes face faculty shortages of 20 perecent to 30 percent. The government directive was sent to the board on Wednesday but was made public only on Friday.

The six new institutes — in the states of Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Gujarat, Orissa, Punjab, and Rajasthan — have no premises or faculties of their own, and most of them are expected to function temporarily out of the seven existing institutions, one local newspaper reported. The exact locations of five of the new institutes have also not been decided. The 13 institutes will have a total of 6,872 seats, 700 of which have been added at the new institutes, said The Times of India.

Admission to the undergraduate engineering program at the elite Indian Institutes of Technology is highly coveted. The institutes are considered among the best engineering schools in the world, and many of their alumni are in top positions in multinational corporations. A record 320,000 applicants took the entrance exam in April.

Coincidentally, on Friday the institutes’ admissions board announced the names of students admitted to the academic session that begins in July.

Some newspapers speculated that the decision to start more institutes than planned had been made with an eye toward national elections, scheduled for next year. India’s minister of higher education didn’t want to give state governments an opportunity to accuse the central government of stifling the states’ educational ambitions, one newspaper said.

Other news-media reports said the decision had been made to accommodate the increase in quota seats this year. India’s Supreme Court in April upheld a 2006 law that allots 27 percent of all seats at national public higher-education institutions to poorer members of lower castes and classes. —Shailaja Neelakantan