Joint Admission Board decides to increase the intake of foreign students at IITs

The Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) across the country have decided to increase the intake of foreign students by 10%. It means, there will be around 1000 foreign students apart from the already existing students at the IITs.

The Indian Institutes of Technology took this paramount decision at a meeting of the Joint Admission Board (JAB). Chairpersons of the IITs had participated in the meeting and Prem Bisht, IIT Madras who is the chairman of the organizing committee presided over the meeting.

The IIT Council chaired by HRD Minister Prakash Javadekar has plans to increase the total intake of students into IITs. The council looks forward to see admissions of up to 1 lakh students by year 2020.

Old IITs have a different stand

Increasing the intake of domestic as well as foreign students is welcomed by all the IITs. However, the newly established IITs have shown more interest in the increased admissions compared to the old ones.

The newly built or established Indian Institutes of Technology have no issues of space for accommodating the extra number of students. And they also have advanced facilities required to cater to the academic needs of the newcomers.

As far as the old institutes are concerned, they do not have sufficient space to fit in the extra students. A senior IIT-Kharagpur official said, "We are in no position to admit extra students despite the government wanting each IIT to increase intake."

"Most of the seat increase has taken place in the newer IITs, which offer more courses than last year and have expanded their intake. At the older IITs, there is a serious space crunch. Even if we can build accommodation, classrooms and other infrastructure from government funding, it takes many years to build world class laboratories which offer state-of-the-art facilities to students. And we would not like to compromise on providing quality education", he added.

Although it is a good development from the point of view of extending academic aides to students of other countries, there seem to be various challenges to implement the same. One has to wait and watch how the HRD Ministry along with the IIT Council will tackle these genuine concerns.

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