IIT Losing Sheen

.

Over 500 Students Say No To IIT

MUMBAI: The Indian Institutes of Technology, where gaining admission is said to be more difficult than entering some of the Ivy League institutes, have had to go through the ignominy of a second round of allotment to fill up all their seats.

As many as 505 students, who got an opportunity to study in these premier technological institutes, did the unthinkable this year; they refused to study in an IIT.

The reasons varied from ‘‘not having confidence in the new IITs’’ to ‘‘getting allotments in not-so-popular streams’’, IIT officials said, adding that this experience might force HRD minister Kapil Sibal to do a rethink on his expansion plans for the IITs. Besides the seven old IITs (Kharagpur, Bombay, Delhi, Madras, Kanpur, Roorkee and Guwahati), eight more were added to the list over the last two years. IITs put up a second selection list to fill the 505 unfilled seats this week, said IIT-Guwahati director Gautam Barua. The second allotment was, however, not done centrally.

‘‘There were several parents who were not comfortable sending their kids to an IIT without a campus currently; few realised that all the old IITs, too, started from temporary campuses,’’ the head of one of the new IITs said. IIT-Bombay JEE-2009 chairman Amiya Kumar Pani explained: ‘‘Students who took admission were offered internal betterment before the second allotment took place.’’ So, if a student with a ranking of 1,104 in JEE-2009 did not take the seat allotted to him, another candidate with a lower ranking got his place (if he had opted for that subject in his preference form). IIT-Delhi JEE-2009 chairman R Chattopadhyay explained that several students moved up the ladder because of this. TOI, on June 25, wrote about how the IITs faced a similar problem filling up reserved category seats.

The institutes, therefore, were forced to transfer over 1,100 reserved-category seats to the one-year preparatory course after not finding enough qualified candidates in the reserved categories. The one-year prep course trains quota students to bring them upto the mark. But the case of these 505 unfilled seats came as a bigger surprise for the IITs as a majority of these students were from the open category (except a handful of cases in which some OBC candidates did not take admission).

‘‘All the students who have been shortlisted in the second list have been informed. They now need to reach the IIT where a seat has been allotted to them and pay the fees,’’ a JEE chairman said.