IITs agree to increase seats by 13%

The seven Indian Institutes of Technology today announced a 13 per cent increase in capacity for 2008-09 which would be able to accommodate 9 per cent quota for other backward classes in the coming year.

The rest of the quota – the Supreme Court has upheld reservation of 27 per cent seats for OBCs — will be implemented in the subsequent two years.

On the other hand, the three new IITs coming up in Andhra Pradesh, Bihar and Rajasthan this year will implement the 27 per cent quota from the first year itself.

At present, there are more than 4,000 seats in the seven IITs at Kharagpur, Mumbai, Chennai, Delhi, Kanpur, Guwahati and Roorkee, annually.

After a meeting of the seven IITs in New Delhi, IIT Delhi Director Surendra Prasad said the institutes, which held their entrance tests for academic year 2008-09 last Sunday, had also decided to set the eligibility for OBC candidates at 10 per cent less than that for the general category.

IIT officials, who did not want to be named, said that of the 321,643 applications received for the IIT entrance examination this year, 64 per cent were from the general category, 10 per cent from scheduled castes and 3 per cent from scheduled tribes. The percentage of OBCs among the applicants was 23 per cent.

According to Prasad, the undergraduate seats in the new year will increase by 880. Of this, 520 will be in the existing seven IITs and 360 in the three new ones.