NEW DELHI: The Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) will create at least 550 extra seats exclusively for women in the batch starting July 2018 as the nation’s premier engineering colleges seek to strike a better gender balance An abysmally small number of women join IITs — it was one in every 10 admissions last year — despite them faring better than men at the higher secondary level. As part of a cure for this, the Ministry of Human Resource Development earlier this month directed all 23 IITs to ensure that at least 14% of their seats went to women in the 2018 batch.“Considering approximately 10% of the students enrolled at IITs last year were women, about 550 supernumerary seats would be needed to bring up the woman percentage to 14% in 2018,” said Aditya Mittal, chairman of the Joint Entrance Examination-Advanced at IIT-Delhi.The government’s aim is to improve the gender ratio at the engineering colleges to at least 20%, or one woman in every five students, by 2020. It will create more supernumerary seats by then if that is needed to achieve the target. To ensure that the plan doesn’t hit any legal hurdles, the HRD ministry has already got it vetted by the law ministry.Last year, when IITs admitted nearly 11,000 students, the percentage of women at some of the institutes fell even below 10%. IIT-Kanpur had only 54 women among the 826 it admitted in 2017, a percentage of 6.5%, while IIT-Guwahati had only 6.3% women among 643 students.Officials at the IITs ET spoke to said they were busy reworking the matrix for seat allocation for the incoming 2018 batch to ensure 14% of admissions to women. There will be no reduction of seats for non-female categories compared with the number of seats allocated in 2017, they said.“We are still working on the finer details of implementation of this proposal,” said Shalabh, the JEE-Advanced organising chairman, who uses only one name. The exact number of seats for admissions this year would be confirmed only by April for all IITs, he said.Industry welcomed the initiative.“The government initiative of improving the percentage of girls at IITs is a great step. There is a shortfall when it comes to the ratio between girls and boys,” said Mona Bharadwaj, head of university relations at IBM India.Gender diversity in engineering colleges has been gradually improving over the past few years, but there's still a lot to be done, said Sayan Dutta, head of university relations at Amazon India. The Amazon Campus Mentoring Series initiative mentors students in engineering colleges, especially women, to get them ready for technical jobs at Amazon.A top official at an IIT blamed parents and social reasons for fewer women joining IITs.“The main reason for this skewed distribution in favour of males is that boys are sent to coaching centres by parents,” said IIT-Mandi director Timothy Gonsalves.Also, a smaller percentage of women who qualify actually join IITs, compared with men. In 2016, there were 2,200 female candidates whose ranks in JEE-Advanced were above the cut-off for IITs, but only 848 of them, or about 38%, joined, said Gonsalves. Among men, 68% of those who qualified joined the IITs.“To understand the reasons for this striking difference between the genders, we examined the choice lists given by candidates,” he said. “It was found that girls on an average filled in fewer choices than boys. Their choices tended to favour a few IITs, a few branches, or a particular geographical region. Clearly, there are societal and parental restrictions on girls which are not there on boys.”The solution was to create extra seats.“We realised that by making supernumerary seats available only for females, we would enable a larger percentage of this set of highly qualified girls to accept an IIT seat,” Gonsalves said.