The Centre has served notice on India’s apex academic engineering body, saying it will not fund it after March 2025, rejecting appeals from academic circles for continued government support for its education and research activities.

The Union science and technology ministry has told the Indian National Academy of Engineering (INAE) that government support to it would stop by March 31, 2025, in line with recommendations of the Centre’s department of expenditure to disengage from the INAE’s activities.

Department of science and technology (DST) secretary S. Chandrasekhar has conveyed the decision to the INAE through a letter, asking the academy “to take necessary action to achieve the objective”.

INAE president Indranil Manna on Tuesday wrote to the academy’s governing council members, seeking their suggestions for a comprehensive plan to raise a corpus fund for the INAE “to ensure its existence” after the government withdrew funding.

The 35-year-old INAE is a body of distinguished engineers and engineer-scientists that promotes engineering and technology education and research and makes recommendations to government departments to guide policy-making. The academy has received around Rs 4.5 crore as annual grants from the DST over the past three years.

Several INAE members and engineering teachers from top academic institutions have expressed dismay at the government’s decision, underlining that science and engineering academies in most developed countries receive government support.

Former department of atomic energy chairman and former INAE president Anil Kakodkar tweeted on Wednesday: “Very unfortunate that the government has decided to disengage from activities of the INAE, an independent platform of most eminent achievers in the area that has been making important contributions to engineering

and technology in the country.”

An engineering faculty member and INAE fellow had told this newspaper in May that the INAE served as a platform to guide policy-making through a collective process. “Now, more than ever, we need strong academies to express collective opinions on issues or policies which many individual engineers are no longer willing to express,” the fellow had said.

The DST had in May this year informed the INAE of the government’s plan to disengage from its activities and urged the academy to turn itself into a non-profit company such as Nasscom, the apex industry body of India’s information technology sector.

“The reason being the government need not involve itself directly into the business of promoting and advancing the practice of engineering and technology… when the same objectives could be effectively achieved by converting the INAE into… a non-profit company like Nasscom,” the DST had said.

The Centre’s decision and the language of the DST letter have disappointed INAE fellows.

“Academies like the INAE are respected and nourished, and their voices heard,” said an engineering professor and INAE fellow at a top central engineering college who requested anonymity.

“It’s unfortunate that some bureaucrats think otherwise and the DST is blindly issuing diktats to the academy instead of fighting on behalf of the INAE.”

Members of the INAE’s governing council have since the DST’s alert in May discussed the option of generating a corpus fund for the academy. Some members have suggested that the INAE aim to raise a Rs 100-crore corpus that would allow it to continue its activities with the interest on the corpus.

The INAE uses the annual funds it gets from the DST to conduct educational and research activities and brainstorming sessions that sometimes yield policy recommendations for the government.