Over 2,400 students dropped out of India’s most prestigious IITs in last two years

• Indian Institute of Technology (IITs) had 2,400 dropout cases in the last two years.
  
• A majority of them were at the postgraduate or PhD level.
  
• Almost half (50%) of the dropouts were from Delhi and Kharagpur campuses.
  
• IITs enroll nearly 17,000 students in its undergraduate and postgraduate courses every year.

As many as 2,461 students dropped out of Indian Institute of Technology (IITs) in the last two years. And, a majority of them were pursuing either postgraduate courses or doctoral programmes.

“The reasons may be attributed to shifting to other colleges, personal reasons, medical reasons, placement during PG courses and pursuing higher education abroad,” Union minister Ramesh Pokhriyal Nishank told the Rajya Sabha during a recent session in the Parliament. Every year, the IITs enroll 17,000 students across undergraduate and postgraduate courses.

Bad health, bad grades

The undergraduates are dropping out due to poor academic performance and medical reasons. Almost half of the students, 1,400 of them, who quit are from IIT’s Delhi and Kharagpur campuses.

Masters students however could be quitting as they are being offered jobs at state-owned firms, especially in Delhi. “On some occasions, we saw 60 students drop out from an M.Tech batch of 80. Then, we were forced to run the programme with just 20 students,” The Print reported citing Dheeraj Sanghi, a professor at IIT Kanpur.

At least half of the students who dropped out, 1,171 students were reserved categories including SCs, STs and OBCs. At IIT Bombay, all of its 260 dropouts were from the reserved quota.

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