IIT RESERVES 779 SEATS FOR WOMEN

In an effort to improve the gender ratio in their engineering programs, Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT’s) will altogether offer 779 seats especially for female candidates over and above their normal intake.

For this year’s JEE (Advanced), the supernumerary seats are expected to almost double the no of females admitted as compared to 2017. The JEE will be held on May 20 this year.

Of the 779 seats these are how they are distributed:

• IIT Kharagpur- 133 seats
• IIT-Dhanbad- 95 seats
• IIT-Kanpur- 79 seats
• IIT-Roorkee- 68 seats
• IIT-Delhi- 59 seats
• IIT-Bombay- 58 seats
• IIT Guwahati- 57 seats

The composition of women students in IIT’s, over the last five years has remained constant between 8 to 10 percent. While in the PG program, the ration is around 22 percent

The IIT Council took this decision of reserving seats for women in the last meeting on April 28 2017. The council set the goal of achieving a target of 14 percent female students in 2018 and 17 and 20 percent in 2019 and 2020.

It was on the recommendations of sub-committee of the Joint Admission Board (JAB) chaired by IIT Mandi director TA Gonsalves, that the council’s decision was based.

The council found that that the actual representation of women is less than 10 percent in the B.Tech program while there are enough women clearing JEE to achieve a 45 percent gender ration.

The report said that it was because of social biases that women are not taking up engineering and also responding to protests and criticism against preferential treatment for women, they said that only females who have cleared the JEE are being considered so there are no biases, as the seats are based on merit.

The report said. “The ranks of females in JEE (Advanced) are lower due largely to systematic societal biases that deprive them of support for JEE (Advanced) preparation equal to that given to boys,”

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