News & Updates

The HRD Ministry's proposal to scrap JEE-Adv for easing admissions into the IITs has been vetoed by the IIT Council and the HRD Minister himself.  The scrapping of the JEE-Adv was one of the agenda items for the Council's meeting yesterday.  The reason cited for the proposal was the low number of candidates who had qualified for JEE-Adv this year.  As per the statistics only 18,138 candidates qualified for JEE-Adv in 2018 as compared with 51,040 in 2017.  The low rate of qualified candidates had let to vacant seats during the last few years. IIT-Kanpur had to come up with an extended merit list this year that allowed an additional 13,850 more candidates to apply at the premier institutes.

Key points from yesterday's Council meeting chaired by the HRD Minister:

• - Proposal to scrap JEE-Adv put on hold
• - Ministry inteds to set up committee to look into either easing the test to reduce dependency on coaching centres or scrapping it
• - Fee relaxation to attract foreign students. Currently foreign students pay ?600,000 per year
• - Recruit more foreign faculty
• - Enhance research for citations in reputed journals
• - Council to ensure adequate number of SC/ST and OBC students to get seats reserved for them

Some metrics that you should know:

• - There are currently 23 IITs, out of which 16 were established after 2008.
• - Out of 12,079 seats, as many as 11,961 seats were filled up in 2018 after cut-off parameters for admission were changed for JEE-Adv.
• - in 2018, with changed norms, 31,988 students qualified for the IITs, out of which 11,961 got admission.
• - In 2017, as many as 51,040 students qualified for IITs, out of which 10,876 were admitted.
• - Girls getting admissted to IITs constituted 15% in 2018 as compared to 9.15% in 2017
• - 118 seats are vacant, which covers disciplines like agriculture engineering, bio-engineering and pharmaceutical engineering