Govt to Scrap Unpopular Courses from IITs and NITs

HRD ministry, under the direction of an expert panel, has accepted the proposal to scrap unpopular courses from IITs and NITs. Under the new regulations, a special round of counselling will be conducted and permit the candidates to register afresh and even impose the penalty on students who do not join their chosen courses. The decision was taken at a meeting held on Friday, February 3, 2017, submitted by the three- member panel headed by the director of IIT Kharagpur.

Also Read: Enrollment of the Girl in IITs in 2015-16 was 8 Percent: HRD Ministry

In order to deal with vacant seats in the premier engineering colleges, the panel was set up to suggest measures to reduce vacant seats. in 2016, seats remained vacant at IITs, NITs and other centrally funded engineering colleges. Following are the number of seats that remained vacant at the premier engineering colleges in the country:

• 3,000 seats were vacant in 23 IITs, 32 NITs and Centrally Funded Institute
• Six rounds of counselling was conducted to fill up the seats
• Number of seats that remained vacant at IITs and NITs were 73 and 1,518 respectively

The ministry rejected the proposal to allow the NITs to convert the seats under the state quota to general category quota failing to fill up after repeated rounds of counselling. This led to the increase in vacant seats. Right now, all the NITs have 50 percent seats reserved for the students who belong to the state where the institute is located.

The ministry also agreed with the recommendations that there is a need to reduce the total number of seats as per the hostel facilities available. MHRD also agreed that quality of laboratories and classrooms can be improved and more faculty members must be hired.

Also Read: Alumni of IIT Kanpur Make it to Elite List of Forbes ‘30 under 30’

The three-member panel also recommended that some of the reputed institutes like NSIT-Delhi,BITS Pilani, BITs Hyderabad, BITs Goa and DTU should be asked to join the joint counselling process. The new decision, however, will require final approval from the Joint Seat Allocation Authority and Joint Admission Board.