Administrators of IITs and NITs stand divided over the Delhi high court's direction to the HRD ministry to conduct common counselling for IITs and NITs. Even as a couple of NIT administrators welcome common counselling, their IIT counterparts seem to differ, stating that it is not a feasible option.
The director of one of the older IITs pointed out that currently there was no known acceptable common seat allocation method between centrally funded technical institutions in the country.
“IITs and NITs have different policies to decide variations in tie-resolution and ranking, besides spill over seats for persons in the disability category. In the IIT system, a student can select only one choice during choice filling in counselling but the 30 NITs across the country allow multiple choice filling and spot allocations. This might also cause problems during upgradation,” the director said.
Former deputy director and professor emeritus at IIT-M’s ocean engineering department Prof V.G. Idichandy says that common counselling has its own issues as both have different entrance exams.
“NITs admit students using JEE (main) whereas IITs take JEE (advanced). Ranking pattern too differs. If you want to do common counselling, someone has to get equivalence of ranking. All these issues will get resolved if government brings in a single entrance exam for all centrally funded institutions,” he said.
The director of the new National Institute of Technology (NIT) welcomed the Delhi high court’s order, as it would be a win-win situation for both institutes and students.
“If we have common counselling, our institutes can share resources and plan accordingly; now we stand as two islands of excellence,” the director said.
NIT administrators are also worried about the Delhi HC's direction to allow IITs to fill up vacant seats through lateral entry as their bright students might join IITs in the second year.
“This will create a lot of vacancies in NITs as bright students will move to the IITs in the second year, hence we want government to review this,” the director said. Prof V.G. Idichandy too said that syllabi differ in IITs and NITs so it would not be proper to introduce a lateral entry system in IITs.
