It is understood that the board of governance of IIT, Mumbai, will meet shortly to give the approvals for setting up the school. The School of IT, as it will be called, will become operational from June next year.

It will also be one of the first such schools to be fully funded by the industry. It is understood that the school, which will focus on emerging technologies in computing, will be set up at an initial cost of Rs 18.5 crore and will incur an annual expenditure of Rs 3.5 crore towards infrastructure and maintenance.

Sources say IIT, Mumbai, has tied up a majority chunk of the funds for the school and is in the process of arranging the balance. "The industry hascommitted about Rs 13.5 crore towards this school, of which the former chief executive of Novell Inc, Kanwal Rekhi, who also happens to be an alumnus of IIT, Mumbai, has committed $2 million (approx Rs 8.5 crore)," said an IIT source.

The school will offer M.Tech in IT and PhD programmes, besides offering a post-graduate diploma in IT, which will be a subset of the M.Tech programme. It is understood that it will start initially with 20 students before going up to 70.

"The school will offer its programmes to students with different backgrounds like chemical or mechanical engineering, but with an understanding of computing. As it is aimed at research, students will be able to concentrate on different areas in the application of IT, which would help industry," sources said.

The school is aimed at coming out with technologies five years down the line, which can be used by the domestic IT industry to gain a competitive edge in the global market. "Since industry will fund the school and be closely associatedwith it, the students will be able to concentrate their research activities on areas and technologies that the industry will need in the future," said a source.

The decision to set up a dedicated school for IT comes at a time when the state government also plans to set up an Indian Institute of Software Engineering (IISE) in Pune in affiliation with the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, US. This self-supporting institute is aimed at providing human resources to the IT industry and for boosting software exports.