The Education Ministry believes this has more to do with unpopular streams being vacant
The craze for engineering as a career is on a downward trend with the number of registrations for Joint Entrance Examinations (JEE) going down each year for the past four years.
In 2015, 14.3 lakh students had registered for the examination, which is a gateway to getting admission in engineering colleges, including the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs). The number fell to 12.8 lakh in 2018.
However, for admission to IITs, students need to qualify another level of entrance examination, which is the JEE-advanced held by the IITs themselves.
Of the total number of students qualifying JEE, the top 1.5 lakh are eligible to appear for JEE Advanced.
The number of those registering for JEE exam has declined by 15.3 percent in the last four years. The data was shared by Ministry of Human Resource Development in response to a written question in Parliament on Monday.
At present, 10,998 seats are available in 23 IITs all over the country. Declining number of JEE registrations has also affected admissions in IITs. Last year, 121 seats were vacant across all IITs in the country, the number was lesser in 2016 with 96 seats vacant. The ministry, however, said this had more to do with unpopular streams being vacant.
“If a student is getting a stream which he/she does not want to pursue, he will take a re-examination instead of taking that seat, which is why the seats are vacant. For example, there is a course in IIT-BHU which is not popular and most number of seats are vacant there only,” said a senior official in the HRD Ministry.
This is the reason that the ministry has also asked IITs to scrap “unpopular” courses and add more seats to popular courses.
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