The Higher Education Ministry may be trying to push the IITs and plan many more, the students aren’t thinking alike. And the proof comes with the fact that most engineering aspirant students who can’t make the cut to the old IITs are opting for NITs or even prime private colleges.
The course at the IIIT Hyderabad is more reputed than the same one at a less prominent IIT," a student from Bengaluru told The Economic Times. "The only way I would choose to study at another IIT would be if I would be able to take a branch transfer after the first year from a lesser-known IIT to an older IIT."
While the number of operational IITs has risen to 18 in 2015 from seven in 2007, new IITs - despite their premium 'IIT' tag - are losing favour both among top students and recruiters, as teething troubles such as poor infrastructure, paucity of faculty and lack of role models persist. Students who do well in JEE but fail to ginto one of the older IITs would rather go to National Institutes of Technology (NITs) or top private engineering colleges than a relatively new IIT. And recruiters say if there is a pecking order then they would prefer to go to the older, more established IITs, than the NITs and then the new IITs, confirms the ET news report.
Since 2008, 11 new IITs have started operating - in Indore, Mandi, Ropar, Patna, Jodhpur, Hyderabad, Gandhinagar, Bhubaneswar, Varanasi, Palakkad and Tirupati. The last two start their first batches this year.
But most of them are still to build the infrastructure and all face an acute shortage of faculty, which now reflect on their ability to attract students and recruiters.
"Faculty shortage is a problem that all the IITs are currently dealing with. This will surely hit the new IITs but all the institutes have to find a way out," Bhaskar Ramamurthi, director at IIT Madras told the financial daily. Beginning 2008, old IITs went through about 50% expansion in student intake over a period of seven years while faculty intake could never match this pace, he said.
Anurag Sharma, dean at IIT Delhi, agreed that the new institutions take at least 5 to 6 years to mature. "It happens to all the institutes in this stage," he said. Sharma also pointed out that each new IIT was given to an old IIT to mentor and that it depends on the mentor to decide whether the new IIT is ready to be launched. "In the case of IIT Delhi, we decided to take another year to formally launch IIT Jammu. The allocation of land took some time. This was purely IIT Delhi's call," he told the ET.