Indian
Express: Chennai: Thursday, June 27, 2019.
RTI
reply reveals Tamils don’t account for even 20% B Tech, M Tech seats;
academicians demand Centre should earmark a quota for State where IIT is
located in
Even
as Tamil Nadu prides in the performance of Indian Institute of Technology -
Madras (IIT-M), students from Tamil Nadu do not account for even 20 per cent
of B Tech M Tech (dual degree) or M Tech
admissions in the last three years.
The
remaining seats are filled by students from other States, especially from
Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, revealed an RTI reply given by IIT-M to E
Muralidharan, a former member of the academic council and an alumnus of the
institution.
On
an average, only about 16 per cent of B Tech seats were filled by students from
Tamil Nadu while Andhra Pradesh and Telangana together accounted for around 40
per cent. The data also showed that around 30 per cent of M Tech (dual degree)
seats and 25 per cent of M Tech seats were filled by students from Andhra
Pradesh and Telangana, as opposed to around 18 and eight per cent from Tamil
Nadu, on an average over three years.
Muralidharan
said while the distribution is not drastically different in other IITs, the
data has still not been made available to him. “Enrolment in all IITs is
dominated by students from Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. However, when I asked
the Ministry of Human Resource Development for admission statistics across the
country through an RTI, they responded saying that I should obtain the
information from individual IITs,” he said.
He
said the Centre should earmark a quota for the State where the IIT is located
in. “Earlier there were only five IITs in the country. However, there are 23
IITs now; one almost in every State. The government should allocate half of all
seats to people from the State it is situated in,” he said.
“A
large amount of taxpayers’ money is spent on every student from IIT and
therefore it is only fair that students from the State the institution is built
in sees benefits from it,” said E Balagurusamy, a renowned educationalist and a
former VC of Anna University.
Speaking
to Express, MK Surappa, Vice-Chancellor of Anna University, said that IITs
could follow the model that Regional Engineering Colleges (REC) did. After
2002, all RECs, which were funded concurrently by the State and the Centre,
were converted into National Institutes of Technology (NIT) that was funded
fully by the Centre. RECs had reserved 50 per cent of the seats for students
from the State it was located in, but this system was scrapped after they
became NITs.
“This
quota gave good representations to students from all states in which NITs were
built. More students got encouraged to pursue engineering as they had local
role models who went to top institutions,” he said. Express could not reach
IIT-M management for comments despite repeated calls and messages.
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