The IIT Council has approved government plans to increase the number of seats in various courses for admitting non-resident students with an aim to take their total intake to one lakh by 2020.
According to a senior official, in a meeting of the IIT Council headed by HRD Minister Prakash Javadekar on Tuesday, it was decided that the student intake across IITs at undergraduate, post graduate and research level should be increased from the current 72,000 to one lakh in a phased manner.
‘In-principle’ approval was given to the proposal for admitting non-resident students, the official said.
The authorities of different IITs will now undertake an exercise to fix the number of additional students they can accommodate.
“At present, the IITs have around 72,000 students in their undergraduate, postgraduate or doctorate courses which are residential. However, it is now planned that students, who will not stay in hostels, should be admitted to these institutes,” an official said.
The plan is to increase the number by 10,000 per year so that the number of IITians touches 1 lakh by 2020, the official said, suggesting that ideally there would be an increase of 4,000 seats in undergraduate courses and 6,000 seats in postgraduate and Ph.D seats, an official said.
Speaking after the meeting, Javadekar announced that the IIT Council has also approved a proposal to introduce the Prime Minister’s Research Fellowships.
The move aims at encouraging IITians passing out of B.Tech to enroll in Ph.D courses straightaway. Another decision taken by the council is to introduce an induction course to help new students adjust as they join these institutes after a rigorous competitive examination.
The IIT Council has also given its nod to a “pilot” run of an aptitude test, the officials said, adding that the modalities will be worked out. They said that this test would not have a bearing on admissions.
The Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) are autonomous public institutes of higher education in the country. They are governed by the Institutes of Technology Act, 1961 which has declared them as institutions of national importance, and lays down their powers, duties, and framework for governance etc.
The Institutes of Technology Act, 1961 lists twenty-three institutes located at Bhilai, Chennai, Delhi, Dhanbad, Dharwad, Goa, Guwahati, Jammu, Kanpur, Kharagpur, Mumbai, Roorkee, Bhubaneswar, Gandhinagar, Hyderabad, Indore, Jodhpur, Mandi, Palakkad, Patna, Ropar, Tirupati and Varanasi.
Each IIT is an autonomous institution, linked to the others through a common IIT Council, which oversees their administration. The Union HRD Minister is the ex-officio Chairperson of IIT Council.
