Country’s premier technology institutes, Indian Institute of Technology (IITs) have added 460 more seats from this year. Increased number of seats will take the total number of seats in IITs to 11,032, help more engineering aspirants to realize their dream of studying in IITs.
The seats will mostly be added in the new IITs. Proposals for increasing the intake have been sent by the IITs located at Bhubaneshwar, Hyderabad, Ropar, Jodhpur, Patna, Indore, Mandi and Jammu to their respective senates and the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) Board.
The final announcement of total number of seats for 2017-18 academic year will be announced by the JEE board soon after senates clear these proposals. “This shows that IITs have been able to improve their infrastructure and can now accommodate more students”, said Y Udaykumar, coordinator of the Joint Seat Allocation Authority (JoSAA) of the IITs and the NITs.
However, some other IITs, such as the ones at Dharwad, Goa and Tirupati, still operate out of rented campuses and have not been able to increase their student strength.
Besides, none of the older IITs has sought a hike in seats, hinting at space crunch in these institutes. One of the only possible ways to hike the intake is by scrapping some of the unpopular courses, seats of which are generally remain vacant.
“In a meeting on February 3, the HRD ministry gave the go ahead for closure or suspension of some of the unpopular disciplines in order to cut down on seats going vacant,“ an IIT official, who attended the meeting, said on condition of anonymity .
All centrally funded technical institutes that participate in joint counselling are directed by the HRD ministry to revise their seat strength. But, it should be done only after a proper review of vacant seats, employment opportunities, national requirement, faculty strength and available infrastructure.
