New Delhi: The governmentd will establish four new Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT), six Indian Institutes of Management (IIM) and 16 central universities, Human Resource Development (HRD) Minister Arjun Singh said on Friday.

Singh told reporters that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had approved the proposals made by the HRD ministry.

The new IITs will come up in Orissa, Madhya Pradesh (Indore), Gujarat and Punjab, while the IIMs will be set up in Jammu and Kashmir, Tamil Nadu, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh (Raipur), Uttarakhand and Haryana.

"These new institutions would be part of the eight IITs and seven IIMs proposed to come up in the 11th Five Year Plan ending 2012," Singh said.

The government had already announced that one IIM would be established at Shillong and four IITs would be set up in Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Himachal Pradesh and Rajasthan.

At present there are seven IITs in the country - Kharagpur, Mumbai, Chennai, Kanpur, Delhi, Guwahati, and Roorkee.

Singh added that the government is planning to convert the Banaras Hindu University's institute of technology into an IIT.

Besides the new IITs and IIMs, the government will upgrade 14 state universities to the status of central universities. Moreover, 16 such universities will also be established in states, which do not have a central university.

Finance Minister P. Chidambaram in his annual budget last month announced an allocation of Rs.344 billion for the education sector - an increase by 20 percent over the previous budget. IANS