IITs and NITs asked to Discontinue Unpopular Courses or Reduce Seats for Counseling

A committee set up to implement measures to minimise vacant seats in premier engineering colleges has said that unpopular courses and streams in IITs and NITs should either be stopped or the seats must be reduced. The committee also suggested that a penalty must be imposed on students for not joining their courses. A three-member panel was set up three months ago by the HRD ministry, after close to 3,000 seats went vacant last year despite conducting six rounds of joint counseling for the IITs, NITs and other centrally funded technical institutions. Out of the total of 3000 seats, 73 seats were vacant at the IITs, while the NITs had 1518 empty seats.

According to sources in the HRD Ministry, the recommendations of the committee will be kept before the IIT and NIT Council for consideration and approval.

As per the report, all the institutes participating in the joint seat allocation may revise the number of seats in each course, and if required, some courses may be shut down and new areas can be introduced. Further, the report states that the new courses should be introduced only after a proper requirement analysis. The panel has also suggested that the institutes must impose penalty (minimum 50% of the seat acceptance fees) on students for late withdrawal or not joining even after the academic session begins, in order to bring down the number of vacant seats.

The committee also suggested the NITs to convert the state quota seats to general seats if the seats go vacant despite multiple counseling rounds. Currently, all the NITs reserve 50 percent seats for home state candidates.

More than 1500 seats went vacant across 31 NITs with even sought-after institutions like NIT Surat and NIT Jalandhar having 115 and 110 vacancies, respectively. According to sources, seats at NITs in the North-Eastern states usually fall vacant because the state quota remains underutilised.