IIT Council Approves Non-resident Students in IITs

In what can really be deemed as a landmark decision, IIT Council has approved MHRD’s proposal in principle to increase the number of students in IITs from the current strength of 72,000 to 1 Lakh through the concept called ‘Non-resident Students’.

Increasing the current strength to 1 lakh will require a considerable time. Hence, the target is to be achieved by 2020. In a couple of days, IIT Council has taken some important decisions that include approving PM Research Fellowship programme that will select 1000 exceptionally talented B.Tech students and give them direct admission into PhD courses with higher scholarships. Apart from this measures are also take to boost the number of female students in IIT and IIMS .

In addition to this, IITs will also become a part of Global Research Interactive Network which is all about joint supervision of PhDs, foreign faculty and student spending semesters in foreign universities. The council will also discuss a plan to boost the rankings of IITs to improve global rankings and reduce the dropout ratio later . 

The IIT Council is also to make its mind on introducing the National Aptitude test that is aimed at testing students’ attitude for engineering. This test will be carried out on a pilot basis and will be conducted twice a year for students of 11th and 12th.

Under the plan, the number of students in B.Tech course is to go up by 4000 from the current number of 10,500, from 8000 to 12000 in M.Tech courses and 3000 to 4500 in PhD programmes. In such a situation, IITs has to look only after the infrastructure and not to bother about the hostel facilities since these students will be staying outside the IIT premises.

Particularly, to identify exceptionally talented B.Tech students, give them the scholarship and enrol into PhD course straightway will help IIT Council to solve the faculty crunch and better the dismal teacher-student ratio in IITs. These decisions are to solve some of the most prominent problems IITs are facing currently.