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- DST has rolled out a plan to offer free coaching to over 50,000 girl students who will be selected based on their Class 10 percentage.
- The programme will be launched at the district level, to begin with.
The central government is aiming to increase the percentage of women students in Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) to 33% by the year 2022. The government has been taking continuous steps to rectify the gender imbalance that is prevalent across top engineering and science institutes of the country.
Department of Science and Technology (DST) has commenced its initiative of training close to 50,000 girl students for a period of two years in the areas of engineering and science. The selection of the girl candidates will be done on the basis of the class 10 percentage. These training classes will guide girl students to crack the IIT entrance examination, which is considered as one of the toughest exams at the UG level.
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Families, especially from the rural areas, are reluctant to send their daughters for coaching purposes to distant education centres. In order to tackle that, the DST has decided to offer IIT-JEE coaching to the girls students with the help of organising two-year long science camps at the district level itself. As a part of this initiative, the coaching classes will be organised in 12 districts to start with and then subsequently in the states soon.
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According to the plan, the coaching classes will be organised in the evenings so that students can pursue Class 11 and Class 12 simultaneously from regular schools. A scholarship amount of Rs. 5,000 will be provided to the students to cope up with the commuting expenses. DST is also devising a plan to urge the IIT Council to allow girl students to choose IITs which are not too far away from their residence.
At present, only 8% female students are enrolled across 23 IITs in India. Despite the encouragement provided to girl students to pursue higher education, the strength of female students in IITs has not witnessed a hike. As per the IIT Joint Admission Board, it will implement policies and inputs to increase the intake of female students in the IITs to at least 1,400 in the academic year beginning 2018.
