More Girls to Get into IITs Next Year

The number of female students in IITs is expected to cross the 2,000 mark in the next academic session. The reason behind this is the government plan to increase the number of seats for girls in some of the top engineering institutes in India.

The women-only seats (supernumerary seats) were created this year to increase the number of females in IITs. In 2018, the number of girls who made it to IIT was 1,062. However, the government introduced 14 percent or 779 supernumerary seats which increased the number of female students to 1,841, seen as the highest so far. This year, total 12,058 seats in all 23 IITs were offered. As per the HRD Ministry, the success of this move to introduce supernumerary seats had encouraged the government to increase it to 17 percent in 2019.

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The government is hopeful that the introduction of about 900 female-only seats will lead to a significant change and help in reducing the gender disparity on IIT campuses.

A committee headed by Timothy A Gonsalves, IIT Mandi Director had given the idea of creating supernumerary seats for women. As per the official figures, the admission percentage for girls in B.Tech programmes was just 9.3 but IIT officials said this year there has been a remarkable change as women have chosen streams which they hadn’t even considered earlier.

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According to a senior Joint Seat Allocation Authority, even though girl students often prefer electric and electronic or computer engineering, this year they were given a lot of other options to choose from. An IIT professor, Dheeraj Sanghi said that the authorities need to look at ending the gender bias that exists perhaps at the examination level.