New Delhi — The globally renowned public Indian Institutes of Technology have formally opposed a proposal by a government education panel to convert them into full-fledged universities, The Telegraph reports.

Senior officials representing the engineering institutes told the panel headed by the former chairman of the University Grants Commission, Yash Pal, that the proposed change was unnecessary and “retrogressive,” the newspaper says, citing unnamed sources who attended the meeting.

The IIT system, the institutes’ officials argued, was superior to that of India’s central universities. They said the institutes already offered varied courses, including management and graduate humanities courses such as philosophy, political science, and economics. The institute’s branch in Madras, formerly Chennai, has even started undergraduate humanities courses, they said.

“From such a liberal education system, to convert IIT’s into rigid universities would be retrogressive,” an unnamed official said.

Mr. Pal had earlier told the newspaper that he was concerned over the inability of the engineering institutes to produce students who pursued research and took up academics as a career. He added that a university-style education — like that offered by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — might help the institutes encourage graduate and research-related studies.

The institutes’ officials conceded, however, that they have principally focused on undergraduate education. The information-technology boom in the late 1990s led to a vast expansion of the job market for engineering graduates, and that has contributed to the drift away from research in all schools of engineering. In 2006, for example, while 230,000 students graduated from engineering colleges across the country, only a little more than 1,000 students received Ph.D.’s in engineering subjects.

“Securing employment after a BTech [Bachelor of Technology] has almost become a cultural feature,” said a 2004 report by a committee set up to review the elite engineering institutes. “The troubling trend has been that a candidate takes to a Ph.D. only when other professional career prospects have been denied to him,” the report added. —Shailaja Neelakantan