IIEST Reduces its Seats by 10 Percent

What could be termed as an anticlimax, the Indian Institute of Engineering Science and Technology (IIEST) has decided to decrease the number of seats for admissions into various courses from the next academic session. The institute will decrease its seats by another 10 percent and bring it to 585 for the next session.

Last year the institute had admitted around 650 students. The recent proposal has been passed by the Board of Governors. This is for the second time that the institute has reduced the seats in a row. When the institute was upgraded to IIEST in the year 2014, the Central Government had asked it to admit around 735 students, which was a 14 percent hike of its total intake.

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A senior officer of IIEST revealed that in both 2014 and 2015, the institute tried to accommodate more students after the directions of MHRD. As a result, the institute had to ask several meritorious students to make their own living arrangements. This happened despite IIEST being a residential campus. The institute had converted its old quarters into new academic blocks. The initiative was taken to improve the infrastructure of the institute and offer better facilities to students. Therefore the intake of students has now been reduced considerably.

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In 2012, the Central Government had promised INR 592 crore for a period of five years for upgrading the institute. Half the money was to be spent on the infrastructure development like laboratories, libraries, classrooms, auditoriums, residential quarters and hostels. But till now the institute received only INR 120 crore. Therefore, the complete infrastructure could not be built till now.