Punjab's first Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), to come up in Ropar, will start functioning from this academic year and 120 students have been admitted to the first batch.

With its permanent campus not ready yet, classes for the first year will, however, commence from its transit campus at IIT-Delhi from July 28.

The institute will shift to the Government Polytechnic Institute campus in Ropar from the next session and will continue functioning from there till its own campus comes up in Ropar on a vacant government land spread over 500 acres. The government has provided the land free of cost for setting up the campus.

To accommodate the IIT, new admissions to the Ropar Polytechnic have been stopped from this year and the remaining batch of 150 students will be given option to shift to any other polytechnic of their choice in the state from the next session, said Tejinder Kaur, Principal Secretary, Technical Education and Industrial Training, Punjab. She said the necessary renovations and alterations in the building will be made as per the requirements of the IIT. Work on the new IIT campus will begin soon, she added.

The Ropar site was approved by a team of IIT-Delhi , comprising its director-principal Dr Surendra Prasad, deputy director Dr H C Gupta and two deans, which visited the state on May 27 and inspected three different sites. It rejected the two sites proposed by the government in Mohali, which included four floors of the eight-storey Sebiz Infotech building in Sector 67 and an industrial plot site in Phase VIII-B.

The Punjab IIT, which will be among the six new IITs coming up in the country, will have 27 per cent OBC reservation, offering electronics, computer science and mechanical engineering branches.