IITs and NITs to scrap unpopular courses

HRD Ministry has seemed to be agreed on the proposal of IIT's and NIT's for scrapping of left out seats at the institutions. The institutes will either reduce the number of seats in program or discontinue some of the least chosen courses and new courses will be introduced.

A meeting was conducted by HRD ministry on February 3, 2017 regarding the report that was submitted by the three-member panel headed by IIT-Kharagpur director.The main reason behind setting up of the panel was to propose some ways to reduce the number of vacant seats in the engineering schools.Moreover, the ministry has also agreed upon conducting special rounds of counselling and penalty for students not showing up on the allotted seats.

In the meeting, the panel was recommended to reduce the number of seats of the least popular courses. The ministry had however rejected on the conversion of state quota seats to general category by NITs in case the seats are vacant.

Despite six rounds of joint counselling, Almost 3,000 seats across 23 IITs, 32 NITs and some centrally-funded technical institutions were left unoccupied by students last year. Of the total, 73 seats at the IITs and 1,518 at the NITs were left untaken by students.

The ministry has agreed on conducting six rounds for counseling. Out of which, first four rounds will be treated as normal rounds with an option of withdrawal of their seats and last two will be special rounds.However, the deadline to finish first four rounds of counseling is given as July 25, 2017 and for sixth round candidates can fill their choices one again and candidates who do not show up to the allotted seats a large amount will be deducted from the admission fee.

The panel had recommended on bringing in of premier institutions like BITs (Pilani, Hyderabad, Goa), NSIT- Delhi, DTU and others in counseling.The ministry will monitor the rules and regulations to facilitate their participation.

And the institutes should conduct meetings and get back in the same regard latest by March 31, 2017.