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More Girls Now Make it to IIT


MUMBAI:
The number of girls admitted to IITs has gone up marginally this year too, from 8% last year to 9% in the current batch. Though, in absolute numbers, girls on the elite institutes' campuses have gone up by 40, compared to 2014, gender disparity continues to be a problem. Of the 9,974 students allotted seats in 18 IITs in the first joint seat allocation process, only 900 are girls. Of the total students who qualified for IITs this year, only 11% were girls. After seat allotments, only 900 got in to the premier institutes. Of the total candidates registered, the number of girls is close to 18%. Before the twotier exam was introduced in 2012, the number of girls registering for the joint entrance examination was steadily on the rise. From around 24.3% of the total registered candidates in 2008, it had gone up to 33.3% in 2012. Professors attribute the poor representation of girls on engineering campuses to the mindset of people. Pradipta Banerji, director, IIT-Roorkee, said girls are poorly represented only in the undergraduate programme, though their success percentage is usually on par with boys.

 

"There are not many girls taking the JEE (Main), so we get fewer students for JEE (Advanced). But at the postgraduate level, we have more women on the campus. In fact, 44% doctorate students on the Roorkee campus are women. Of the total student population, they constitute around 15%," said Banerji, adding that people are unwilling to send their girls to a residential campus. A professor from IIT-Bombay agreed that students on IITs come from a pan-India population and therefore it is difficult to expect a quick change in mindset. IITs had reduced the entrance test fee to half for girls, said Devang Khakhar, IIT-Bombay director and chairman of JEE (advanced). Last year, of the five students from IIT-Bombay who bagged the top offer from a social networking site during placements, two were girls.

Posted on 21 Aug 2015