Leading technical institutes of the country, the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) will not provide any subsidy to foreign students in their education when they are admitted to their institutes from the next academic year onwards. The central government has finally decided on this matter. Foreign students have to pay INR 6 lakh each year as against to domestic students who have to pay INR 2 lakh per annum.
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In order to attract more international talent, the IITs for the first time will hold its entrance tests aboard. The IITs, in its council meeting that was held in September, decided to conduct the test for foreign students for the first time.
The prestigious technical institutes of the country will organise entrance tests in UAE, Singapore, Ethiopia and six-nations of the SAARC countries except for Pakistan, from the next academic year. This will help them select foreign students for its various undergraduate and postgraduate courses such as B.Tech, B.Arch, M.Tech etc.
Right now, IITs do not admit any foreign students to its courses. The IIT Council had given the responsibilities to Devang Khakar, director IIT Mumbai, to suggest the actual amount of tuition fees that shall be paid by the foreign students. Khakar was to decide if the government should also provide the subsidy for foreign students or not. In his communique to the central government he had recommended that a foreign student has to pay INR 2 lakh. But the Ministry of Human Resource Department overruled the suggestion forwarded by Devang Khakar. Now an order to this effect (as mentioned above) has been issued to all the IITs on Monday, 28th November 2016. However these foreign students will be eligible for scholarships through institution funding and ICCR.
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IITs will conduct the entrance test JEE Mains for the first time to admit foreign students in the year 2017. The government also made it clear that the seats that will be offered to foreign nationals would be additional or supernumerary in nature. It will not reduce the number of seats offered to Indian nationals at the 18 IITs of the country.