IIT Madras has embroiled itself in controversy with gold coins distributed to 1,500 of its employees from it Corpus fund as golden jubilee souvenirs.

A faculty member pointed out that at the 39th meeting of the IIT Council held in January 2009 where the issue of expenditure by IITs for Golden Jubilee celebrations was discussed, it was decided against sanctioning funds for the purpose.

“Corpus funds were created for specific purposes along with rules for inflow as well as outflow of funds. The corpus funds were generated from industrial consultancy and sponsored projects using infrastructure, human resources and facilities that have been created in IIT with HRD Ministry funds. This automatically implies that IIT does not have financial autonomy to spend it even with the Board’s approval, as pointed out by the 39th IIT Council,” he argued. At IIT-M, the corpus funds have been transferred as a loan to build the IIT Research Park amd for executing the second phase of the flagship National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning.

A section of the faculty also questioned the alleged non-transparency in purchasing the gold coins, presumably worth a crore rupees, without floating an open tender. Ananth told colleagues, “All procedures were followed and the nationalised banks contacted for the supply of thesouvenirs.”