Mumbai: India Institute of Technology (IITs), the premier institutes of India, are losing sheen, or its seems so, as students deny taking admission, even after qualifying for the Joint Entrance Test, conducted by IITs. As per the sources, more than 500 students have refused to get into IITs and it will go through the ignominy of a second round of allotment to fill up the seats.
Students have come up with their own reason to refuse to study in IITs. Reasons are many some mentioned that they don’t have confidence in the new IITs, while for some they did not get their own choice of streams. According to an IIT official, 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.
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 this year more than 500 candidates who have refused admission to IITs belonged to the open category. Gautam Barua, Director IIT-Guwahati said that IITs put up a second selection list to fill the 505 unfilled seats this week. He also adds that the second allotment was, however, not done centrally.
