Sumi Sukanya dutta By

Express News Service

NEW DELHI: A decision is likely to be taken on scrapping some of the "unpopular" courses at the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology in the annual IIT Council meeting this week. The courses could be discontinued owed to very low interest shown by candidates and consistently vacant seats in the IITs for last few years, sources in the Union Human Resources Development Ministry and IITs said.

"Branches such as agricultural engineering, biochemical engineering and pharma engineering are not getting enough admission, probably due not so good career prospects and other institutes offering better course structures," said a senior HRD Ministry. "So we will discuss this issue in the IIT Council on Tuesday and see if the courses which are not generating interests among students can be dropped from next academic session," the official added.

IIT directors take part in the IIT Council meeting every year, chaired by HRD Minister, where a number of common decisions related to IITs are taken and action plan is formulated. A total of 118 seats for B Tech courses have remained vacant in the Indian IITs, almost similar a number to last year when 121 seats had gone vacant.

"This is an issue of major concern for us as we do not want even a single seat of the premier engineering institutes to go vacant," another HRD official said. In the recently concluded session of the parliament, HRD Minister Prakash Javadekar, in response to a query in the Raj Sabha had said that 11,961 BTech seats had been filled this year in the 23 IITs, leaving 118 seats vacant."We have increased seats by (over) 1,000. And, out of the 12,079 seats (available), I am very happy to announce, 11,961 seats have been filled. The Other Backward Classes, Scheduled Caste (and) Scheduled Tribe quotas have completely been filled,-" Javadekar had informed the Upper House.

Sources in the Ministry said that IITs had been advised last year too, to discontinue the courses that are failing to attract students in large enough numbers. Some of the branches that are usually in high demand too have witnessed a few vacancies this year. A professor at IIT Kanpur said that this happened as some students had blocked the seats during the several rounds of counselling but did not turn up for admission.

This year the IITs had created 800 supernumerary seats for female students. This has raised the enrolment of girls from 9 per cent last year to 15 per cent this year. Some IITs, like IIT Delhi, had conducted special programmes to encourage girl students to opt for programmes usually not preferred by them.