NIT's proposal: Admit students to both IITs & NITs through JEE Advanced

NEW DELHI: The IIT council will take up next week a proposal of the NIT council’s standing committee to admit students to both IITs and NITs through a single entrance examination — the JEE Advanced. The move is likely to trigger a controversy in the IIT system. The proposal will be taken up by the NIT council at its October 1 meeting first, following which it will be taken to the IIT council — the apex body chaired by the HRD minister that coordinates between all IITs — at its October 6 meeting.

It is learnt that the Smriti Irani-led HRD ministry favours the proposal for a single exam for IITs and NITs. IITs have traditionally resisted any move to grant NITs parity and the HRD ministry had to take considerable efforts to make IITs agree to joint counselling with NITs.

“IITs and NITs draw from the same pool of students. IITs already draw the best of students through the JEE Advanced which has a reasonably high difficulty level. If the NITs — which are also excellent engineering institutes — are allowed to draw from that pool, the overall quality will improve. The aim is one exam, one ranking system and one counselling for both IITs and NITs. We hope that a final decision will be taken on this at the IIT council meeting,” a member of the IIT council told ET.

While the JEE Advanced helps select about 10,000 students to enter the famed portals of India’s 16 IITs, if the entrance exam is opened up to NITs, this number will go up to 34,000. The Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) alone determines admissions to prestigious IITs. While it was the All India Engineering Entrance Examination (AIEEE) that earlier determined admissions to the National Institutes of Technology (NITs) and all other engineering colleges, the format was changed when Kapil Sibal was HRD minister in UPA-II.