Vacant IIT seats 'question' admission process

Akshaya Mukul, TNN, Oct 19, 2010

NEW DELHI: IITs have rolled back last year's admission policy of filling up vacant seats at the start of the semster.

Unlike last year, IITs have also not published the opening and closing ranks of each course/stream immediately after the admission.

"This puts a question mark on the complete admission process. In 2006, when the non-transparent process of admission was unearthed, IITs had to do counselling all over again," an IIT director said.

As for the vacant seats, a reply to an RTI query has revealed that a few hundred seats in general category were lying vacant between 2000 and 2008.

In a rare first, IITs had admitted students in the second round for the academic session 2009-10. The seats, which were surrendered by students at the time of the start of the academic session in each IIT, were offered to the wait-listed candidates to fill up all the vacant seats.

This year, IITs, however, have conducted admission twice. One took place in June after the results were declared, and the second one occurred in early July to fill those seats that were lying vacant and fees were not paid.

But since the second round of admission was done well before the seats were surrendered, many vacant seats are still unoccupied.

"Every year students surrender seats if they do not get a branch of their choice. Also, in many cases a student deposits the fee hoping that he may get a better branch but when this does not happen, he takes another chance," a senior IIT teacher said.

In violation of their own rules, IITs have already refused to refund the admission fee to those candidates who surrendered their seats on the ground that there were no takers. "How can one take the vacant seats if it is not offered to anyone? IITs did not make public the list of such seats. This is a paradox. Candidates who surrendered their seats are waiting for refund, which can be given only if the seats are filled. But the seats are not being filled because IIT is not offering them," an IIT professor said.

Pointing out the anomaly, he added that the Central Counselling Board of All India Engineering Entrance Examination has conducted seven rounds of counselling to fill up the vacant seats.