Mumbai: Registrations for the upcoming Joint Entrance Examination-Advanced (JEE-Adv) ended on Thursday and of the 2.5 lakh eligible candidates, only 1.6 lakh students have completed the process. 50 foreign nationals have also registered for the exam. JEE-Adv is the one window exam for admissions to premier Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs).
“Students who have filled the forms and are yet to pay the examination fee have time until August 12 to complete the process. This year’s JEE-Adv exam will be conducted across 226 cities on August 28,” said an official from the JEE 2022 office.
In 2020, and 2021 only 1.60 lakh students finished the registration process, and less than 1.5 lakh students eventually appeared for the test. The intake capacity across 23 IITs was over 16,000 seats in 2021.
For years, seats across IITs have been going vacant, especially in the newer IITs. Last year, 630 seats had remained vacant after the first round, while the number stood at 600 after the first round of admission in 2018. In some cases, lack of applications in certain reserved categories has been the main reason for seats even in popular IITs and courses going vacant.
Until 2015, the Joint Seat Allocation Authority (JoSAA) conducted three rounds of seat allotment, which was increased to six rounds in 2016 in order to bring down vacancy of seats in IITs. However, in 2017, 2018, and 2019, seven rounds of admissions were conducted but almost all IITs—old and new—had few seats vacant by the end of the common admission rounds.
The number of seats going vacant in IITs has been a growing concern for authorities as well as officials from the HRD ministry. While 121 seats were left vacant in 2017, the figure stood at 96 the previous year. Consequently, the ministry asked IITs to consider various ways, including the option of scrapping unpopular courses, to address the problem.
“All the top courses across popular IITs are taken in the first three rounds itself. Students are very ambitious and clear about their choice of course and institute and when they know they haven’t managed to bag the seat they want, they end up opting for a private engineering institute closer home,” said a senior professor from IIT Kanpur, and former JoSAA member.
