779 More Seats For Women Candidates In IITs This Year
'It will help the girl students to get the privilege of higher studies in premier technological institutes. It'll also tackle issue of gender imbalance in IITs,' said a student of IIT Kharagpur on the decision of adding 779 more seats exclusively for women candidates. In January 2017,
the decision in its nascent stage was hugely applauded. To address the issue of decrease in women students in the institutes a panel, had recommended for the reservation. 'The number of seats for male candidates will not be affected and this will help IITs achieve the 1 lakh target by 2020. Also, only candidates who have already qualified in JEE-Advanced will be considered,' clarified the panel, then.
With a hope that the initiative, a first of its kind, will help increase the number of female enrollments in the IITs, it has been decided to hike the seats to 20%. 'Seats to be decided based on number of girls already in system. In coming year, target is to go up to 14% girls,' said Sudeshna Sarkar, faculty at IIT Kharagpur.
'Of the 779 seats, 113 seats are given to IIT Kharagpur, followed by 95 seats to IIT-Dhanbad, 79 to IIT-Kanpur, 76 to IIT-BHU, 68 to IIT-Roorkee, 59 to IIT-Delhi, 58 to IIT-Bombay and 57 to IIT-Guwahati,' reported the Hindustan Times.
This development is happening at a time when CBSE is conducting the admission process for the IITs where the data saw a huge difference between male and female applicants for the entrance exam, i.e. JEE Main. As per the data given by CBSE, the exam conducting body of JEE Main, the number of male applicants is almost the double of females. This hints a lesser participation in females for the JEE Main which is a qualifying exam for JEE Advanced (the scores of which are used by IITs for admission to BTech programmes). Subsequently a greater gender imbalance is seen during the enrollment.
On the other hand, this decision has come after the
MHRD released data reporting lesser enrollment in IITs. MHRD constituted the committee to recommend suitable measures in order to minimise the vacancies in IITs, National Institutes of Technology (NITs) and other Centrally-Funded Technical institutions (CFTIs), an official told PTI. For improving Gender Balance in IITs, the IIT Council in its 51st meeting held on April 28, 2017, on the basis of the recommendations of a JAB Sub Committee, and decided to increase female enrolment in B.Tech. programmes of IITs from the current 8% to 14% in 2018-19, 17% in 2019-20 and 20% in 2020-21 by creating supernumerary seats.
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