More than 1500 Seats Vacant in 31 NITs

More than 1500 seats are lying vacant in 31 National Institute of Technologies in India. This has led these institutions to ask the Ministry of Human Resource Development’s (MHRD) nod to make outstation candidates eligible for state quota seats. This time, however, there is the sharp fall in the number of seats lying vacant as compared to 5500 last year that had no taker.

As per the data provided by the Joint Seat Allocation Authority (JOSAA) that does joint counselling for IIITs, NITs, IITs and other central government funded institutions, around eight percent of the total NIT seats have no taker as of now. The highest number of seats lying vacant is in NIT Agartala. Even in highly popular and sought after institutions like NIT Jalandhar and NIT Surat, 110 and 115 seats are vacant respectively.

MHRD’s decision is still pending as the ministry hasn’t still taken any stance on opening up state-quota seats for outstation candidates as proposed by NIT. Perhaps, there might be another round of spot counselling before a final call is taken on the proposal.

Contrary to this, the percentage of vacancies laying vacant in IITs is just 0.76 percent or in other words, 73 out of total 9660 seats. IIT BHU, the recently converted IIT, has the highest number of 38 seats lying vacant.  IIT Jammu and IIT Kharagpu have four and seven seats lying vacant respectively. However, the problem stands in NITs where the number of seats lying vacant is anywhere between 16 percent and 31 percent.