After IIT Bombay, IIT Delhi and IIT Madras closed campus for the entire year

Following IIT Bombay's footsteps, IIT Delhi and IIT Madras shifted the current semester online and deferred classroom lectures for the entire year. 

Indian Institute of Technology, IIT Bombay, recently scrapped classroom lectures and decided to conduct online classes for the entire upcoming semester. Showing concerns towards the lives of the students as well as its staff members, IIT Bombay clearly mentioned that conducting physical classes pose a health risk and nothing is more important than lives, the classes would be conducted only through online mediums. Following the footsteps, two more IITs, IIT Delhi and IIT Madras joined the decision.

Also Read: IIT-Bombay defers face-to-face lectures until year-end amid COVID-19 crisis

IIT Delhi along with IIT Madras also suspended all physical lectures for the upcoming semester in view of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic situation. The institutes would offer all their programmes only via online mode. IIT Delhi decided not to open its campus before December this year. The director of the institute Ramgopal Rao said, "We do not have a choice this year. We will follow the sub committee’s report, which recommends online mode to conduct classes for the upcoming semester.”

Recently, the students of IIT Kharagpur are also asked to vacate the campus hostel. Almost 400 students are stuck in the campus hostels and are asked to vacate them by June 20 only to come back in September. The registrar of IIT Kharagpur B N Singh said, “They are our children. If they have some difficulty in shifting immediately, we cannot force them. But since the next semester is more than two months away, there will be little academic activity for them.”

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A subcommittee of the six IITs prepared the report in wake of novel coronavirus pandemic. The report was submitted to the standing committee of IIT council in June. According to various media reports, the report suggested that the admissions should be as per the schedule of JEE Main and the interviews must be conducted online to start the new programme in December 2020- January 2021. A reduction in the PG programme duration in all IITs is also suggested in the report. The situation will be reviewed by the IITs again in October 2020. The students are advised to monitor the official websites of IITs for all the latest updates.

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