The Indian Institute of Technology, country’s premier technical schools and the only ones to make it to the top 300 in the global rankings and the ultimate destination for engineering aspirants is slowly losing its charm.Students are now declining seats in the IITs.
JEE (Advanced) 2014 organizing chairman, M K Panigrahi stated that at the end of the first phase of counselling of the 9,711 seats made available this year, only 9,061 have been filled.
This must be because students who qualified in JEE (Advanced) may not have enough marks in class XII boards to make it to the top 20 percentile as required for admission to the IITs.
Others may be set on a particular course and would rather give up a seat in one of the IITs than opt for a stream they don’t want to pursue.
But according to an IIT faculty member, the top five IITs – Delhi, Mumbai, Madras, Kanpur and Kharagpur are still in demand but the newly established 11 campuses which include Mandi in Himachal Pradesh and Ropar in Rupnagar, Punjab for instance do not have quite the same appeal.
Previous year several seats were not filled when the IITs conducted only one round of counselling , so the institutes in 2013 conducted three rounds of counselling. Still at the end of the third round, students left more than 200 seats vacant.
