Brand IIT is not enough to fetch students for some courses

The Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) authorities are worried and will revise some of the least pursued courses to avoid increasing vacancy rate in the institute. The total number of admissions in  IIT Delhi was 850 and about 750 seats remained vacant in 2011. About 13,000 students were selected through the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE), but a large number of students did not applied for admission in IITs and some of them dropped out after taking admission.

IIT-Kanpur director, Sanjay Dande, has conducted the IIT-JEE admission exams 2011 and he said that some of the institutes run some unpopular courses to fill up the vacancies. For example, Indian School of Mines (Dhanbad) offers a course on paper and pulp technology and this course has no takers.

Another major reason for the high dropout rates is that the popular courses are readily available in other technological institutes. The number of technological institutes in the country has increased in last few years. A candidate said that after depositing the initial fee of Rs. 40, 000 in IIT Roorkee; he has dropped out because he got a better course option at National institute of technology.

Most of the dropouts do not bother to inform the institute, as the IITs do not have a system of refunding the fees and these seats are shown as filled in the records. Rajiv Kumar of IIT-Kharagpur has recommended that the seats should be declared vacant after a period of time and should make it open for admission. He added that IITs should also refund the fees deposited so that seats are not unnecessarily blocked.

Source: Richha Bhatnagar (Shiksha Team)