By IANS,
New Delhi : The seven Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and three upcoming ones will implement reservation for other backward classes (OBCs) from the new academic session this year by adding 880 seats.
“The seven old IITs will implement nine percent quota for OBC candidates and the new institutes will implement 27 percent reservation in the new academic session,” IIT Delhi Director Surendra Prasad told reporters here Wednesday.
“All the three new IITs will have 120 seats each and they will implement the quota in totality. The seven old IITs will increase the student intake by 13 percent to accommodate the nine percent reservation this year,” Prasad said after all IIT directors had a meeting with human resource development (HRD) ministry officials here.
The three new IITs coming up in Rajasthan, Bihar and Andhra Pradesh will start operations from the coming academic session.
The directors of seven IITs, the Indian Institute of Mines, Dhanbad (Assam) and the Institute of Technology at the Banaras Hindu University (Uttar Pradseh) were in Delhi to discuss and devise a roadmap to implement the OBC reservation in their institutes.
All the nine institutes follow the IIT-joint entrance examination (JEE) to select students every year.
Every year a total of 4,000 students take admission in various undergraduate courses in seven IITs at Mumbai, Guwahati, Roorkee, Chennai, Kanpur, Kharagpur and Delhi.
“The existing IITs will increase student intake by 54 percent to put in place 27 percent reservation by the 2010 academic session,” S.C. Saxena, director of IIT Roorkee, told IANS.
“Both undergraduate and postgraduate courses will take OBC candidates in compliance with the quota law,” Saxena said.
Gautam Barua, director of IIT Guwahati, said the directives of the Supreme Court duly forwarded by HRD ministry last week shall be used for categorization of eligible OBC candidates.
“During the counselling, we will screen all OBC students and leave out the ‘creamy layer’ from the selection process of reserved candidates. As for the verification of the category status of candidate, the existing rules and norms of government of India shall apply,” Barua said.
Prasad said OBC candidates would get a concession of 10 percent in selection cut off marks to get an entry into the IITs.
“The cut-off for OBC category students shall be 90 percent of the cut-off of general category students in the JEE,” Prasad said.
The directors said that they did not see a degradation of quality in education due to the implementation of OBC quota in the IITs.
“We don’t see any reason for quality going down,” Barua added.