Education, Careers & Professional News
IITs to lower cut-offs, fill seats
In the history of IITs, there has never been a second round of admissions. This year, though, vacant seats at all 13 IIT campuses, as also at IT-BHU and Indian School of Mines-Dhanbad, will be filled after a second list is soon put out.
After a campaign by TOI, HRD ministry met IIT chiefs on Tuesday in New Delhi and asked them to fill the empty seats. However, what comes as a shock is that the ministry is not interested in de-reserving vacant seats that were meant for SC, ST and OBC candidates. Instead, the ministry wants the premier engineering schools to dilute merit and further bring down cutoffs to admit reserved category students.
After Tuesday’s meeting, IIT-Delhi director Surendra Prasad said, “We will be taking additional students.’’
The IIT Joint Admission Board has called for an urgent meeting next week to discuss modalities of filling up seats that have gone abegging.
IIT-Madras director M S Ananth pointed out that it is ‘‘criminal’’ to take in students with cutoffs that are further relaxed. ‘‘These students will suffer and so will their self-confidence,’’ he told TOI.
This year, 3.11 lakh students took the JEE for 6,992 seats in 13 IITs and Banaras Hindu University (Institute of Technology) and ISM, Dhanbad. Of these, 414 seats were reserved for ST candidates, but only 159 students were shortlisted. Similarly, only 690 were shortlisted for the 832 SC seats. The OBC figures were 1,099 out of 1,134.
While the last general category student who got admission scored 180/489, the last SC/ST candidate secured 104.
More : timesofindia.indiatimes.com