Mumbai: The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), where gaining admission is like a dream come true for any student, seems to losing its charm, as its 769 seats remained vacant after the first round of admission. Now, IIT will have to conduct a second round of admission to fill up its remaining empty seats.
As per information, 769 students, who got a chance to enroll in IIT, refused to take admission and study in the institute. According to the previous years’ records, it happened first time in the IIT history, when even the general category seats have remained unoccupied after the first round of admission.
As per sources, earlier, only reserved categories seats used to go vacant, but this year even the general category students have the opportunity as seats are up for grabs. The reasons for not joining the premier institutions varied from not having confidence in the new IITs'' to getting allotments in not-so-popular streams''.
According to H C Gupta, JEE (advanced) Chairman, the second round, which starts on Wednesday, offers hope to aspirants to get into top engineering schools of India. He also added that the hundreds of seats are available for students of all categories. He also added that while there are seats available in every IIT, most vacant seats are at ISM-Dhanbad. IT-BHU (now an IIT), which used to have many unfilled seats, does not have as many vacancies this year. It has improved.
As informed by the officials, students who took admission were offered internal betterment before the second allotment. So, if a student with a ranking of 1,100 did not take the seat allotted, another with a lower ranking got that place (if he opted for that subject in the preference form).
As per information, 505 seats were vacant after completion of first round in 2009, while 300 seats remained empty and came up in the second round in 2011. But until a few years ago, IITs did not conduct a second round of admissions and vacant seats used to be transferred to the preparatory programme, a bridge course to bring quota students to the mark.
According to a 1993 report by the former IIT-Madras director P V Indiresan and former IIT-Delhi director N C Nigam, nearly 50% reserved seats remain vacant as SC/ST students are unable to secure the minimum threshold marks. Of those admitted, almost 25% are told to leave due to poor performance.
