BackNITs, IITs to extend admission window to fill up seats from 2017
The move comes after around 1,500 seats fell vacant in 2016 at NITs and 73 at IITs
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New Delhi: From 2017, the government will allow National Institutes of Technology (NITs) to continue the selection process of students till all seats are filled, human resource development minister Prakash Javadekar said on Monday.
An extended counselling window for NITs means Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) too will reap the same benefit as seat allocation for IITs and NITs happens together.
The move comes after around 1,500 seats fell vacant in 2016 at NITs and 73 at IITs. Since these institutes are the best engineering schools in India and the competition for admission to them is fierce among aspirants, allowing so many seats to go vacant raises eyebrows.
But 2016 is not the first time that seats have gone vacant. In 2015, more than 3,000 seats at NITs were vacant. But in 2016, the NITs had asked the government to allow them an extended counselling session to fill up seats.
Speaking at IIT-Guwahati, Javadekar said his government has looked at the demand for an extended counselling but will make changes from 2017 and not in 2016 due to a Supreme Court order.
“Since Supreme Court ordered no admission after August 15, this year no spot round was possible in #NITs @PrakashJavdekar," the HRD ministry said on Twitter on Monday.
“From next year onwards @PrakashJavdekar directed counselling shall be conducted continuously till August 10 or till vacancies are filled up," the HRD ministry said in another tweet.
Javadekar also inaugurated the Param-Ishan supercomputer at IIT-Guwahati. The supercomputer has a power of 250 teraflops and a 300 terabyte capacity and can be used in areas like computational chemistry, computational fluid dynamics, civil engineering structures, etc, the HRD ministry said in a separate statement.
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