There are few courses at the IITs and NITs which are not sought after like most other courses, hence HRD Ministry has decided to either discontinue or reduce the number of seats.
Of late, addressing the seat vacancy issues at the premier engineering institutes has become a primary agenda in the field of technical education in India. Taking into account the huge number of seats left vacant at the IITs and NITs recently, HRD Ministry has setup a three-member committee to look into the matter, lead by Partha Pratim Chakraborty, IIT-Kharagpur Director .
The huge number of vacant seats even at the end of six rounds of joint counseling at the premier institutes last year had prompted the HRD Ministry to decide this move. There are nearly 3000 seats together vacant in the premiere institutes. It is guessed the committee will place its reports and recommendation before the IIT Council and NIT Council for their approval.
Panel recommendations are as follows: Instead of bringing down the not so popular courses, the panel recommends forcing some penalty if some applicant withdraws from the course or joins the course late. A penalty of 50 percentage of the application fee can be imposed on the students who do not comply with direction. The committee also recommends NITs to resolve the issue by converting state quotas to general seats in case of vacancies even after the rounds of counseling. 50 percent of seats at NITs are reserved for domiciled students as of now. Since the state quotas are not utilized most seats in the northeast states NITS lay vacant most of the times. There were about 1500 vacant seats across the NITs last year. Since the JEE rank is no longer calculated based on class 12 marks the seat allocation process will start early as per the report issued by the committee.