Revision as of 07:33, 11 July 2013

Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs)

IITs put India on world map/ 3 Institutes Feature In Top 50 Global Univs For Engg Courses

Kounteya Sinha , The Times of India 2013/05/09

The Times of India

London: IIT Delhi’s electrical engineering department has been ranked the 37th best globally, the highest entry from India across all categories in the latest Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) world university rankings.

QS is a reputed British education and career advice company, which, until 2010, produced the rankings with the Times Higher Education.

The IIT Bombay’s civil engineering department has been ranked 39th while IIT Delhi’s mechanical and aeronautical engineering department has been positioned 43rd. Indian Institute of Science ranks 50th in materials science.

IITs have come as the only saving grace for Indian universities in the rankings released on Wednesday. Not a single university or department has made it to the top 200 altogether in 12 of the 30 disciplines covered in the global rankings.

Important subjects without a single Indian institution featuring in the top 200 include medicine, law, economics and education.

The best performances from Indian universities came in the field of engineering, as expected. IIT Bombay, IIT Delhi and IIT Madras are all ranked in the global top 50 in at least one of the four areas of engineering: civil, mechanical, electrical and chemical.

Delhi University and JNU have made it to the top 100 in the world for English literature. Chinese universities, on the other hand, have bagged 37 top-50 rankings in 23 subjects, compared to just four for India.

“These rankings reflect the progress made by the IITs in recent years in engineering, but in many other areas of the academic spectrum, India is lagging way behind its international competitors,” said QS head of research Ben Sowter.

“India faces numerous challenges as it attempts to expand participation and increase university funding. These rankings make it clear that it is some way off achieving a truly internationally competitive higher education system,” he added.

Covering 30 subjects, the QS rankings by subject are the largest of their kind. The US and UK universities dominate the list, with Harvard ranking number one in 10 subjects, ahead of MIT (7), University of Oxford (4), UC Berkeley (4), University of Cambridge (3), Imperial College London (1) and UC Davis (1).

IIT Delhi’s electrical engineering department has been ranked the 37th best globally, the highest entry from India across all categories in the latest QS world university rankings

Admissions: Weightage to class XII scores

80% IIT entrants from just 3 boards

Hemali Chhapia TNN

The Times of India 2013/07/11

Mumbai: For long, when it came to getting into IITs, signing up with the right coaching centre was what mattered more than which school board you attended. But the new entrance exam system, which gives weightage to class XII scores of candidates, has changed the rules of the game in one fell swoop.

The list of candidates selected last week for the IITs showed that a vast majority of the successful candidates – more than 8,000 out of 9,700 – or over 80% came from just three school boards: the CBSE, Andhra Pradesh and Punjab state boards.

“More than 5,500 students come from the CBSE board. Then, there are close to 1,800 of them from Andhra Pradesh and another 750 from Punjab,” said JEE (advanced) chairman H C Gupta, about this year’s list. There are 30 other boards in India from where a small count of students has qualified. “There are anywhere between five and 10 to over 100 students from some other boards,” Gupta said.

NEW EQUATION

8,000 of 9,700 students selected came from three boards — CBSE, Andhra Pradesh & Punjab

Of these, 5,000 are from CBSE, 1,800 from Andhra and 750 from Punjab

CBSE has sent more students than other boards in past too. In 2011, of 13,196 qualified candidates, 56% were from CBSE

Statistics from the IITs show that in JEE 2010, of the qualified candidates, 58% were from CBSE, 36% from state boards and 6% from ICSE. While 3.5% of the CBSE candidates qualified, it was 2.3% for state boards and 2.7% for ICSE

A shortage of teachers

A shortage of teachers

43% of teaching slots in IITs lying unfilled Engg Students Prefer Jobs To Pursuing PhDs

By Atul Thakur, TIMES INSIGHT GROUP, 2013/03/30

The Times of India

New Delhi: At a time when ‘skill shortage’ is bemoaned by industry, nearly half of all teaching positions in IITs and over half in NITs are lying vacant. This was revealed recently in response to a question in the Lok Sabha.

It’s not only newly created IITs and NITs that face shortage. Old IITs have over 40% of their teaching positions vacant and the situation in old NITs is even worse with 57% of faculty jobs finding no takers.

In eight older IITs (including IT BHU and Roorkee University — now converted into IITs) the sanctioned strength of teaching staff is 5,356 but there are only 3,158 teachers in regular positions, resulting in 41% vacant seats. With 57% vacancy, IIT-BHU has the worst figures. It is followed by IITDelhi (50%), IIT- Kharagpur (48%) and IIT-Guwahati (42%). For the remaining four IITs, the vacant teaching positions range between a low of 19% of the sanctioned strength for IIT-Kanpur and 38% for IIT Roorkee.

A parliament question inquiring about the shortage of faculty was answered on March 13 where the ministry noted the reason for shortage as lack of PhD candidates in engineering. It also said that students preferred corporate jobs over teaching. No regular teacher in 10 new NITs New Delhi: Of the 5,891 sanctioned teaching posts in 20 old NITs, only 3,083 are filled by regulars. The 48% gap between required and employed teachers is much higher than vacancies in the IITs. NITs at Warangal, Patna, Srinagar, Jamshedpur, Kurukshetra, Agartala and Raipur have over 50% vacancies in teaching positions. NITs at Calicut, Silchar and Rourkela are the only institutes where vacancy is less than 40%.

Considering the shortage of academic staff in old and reputable colleges, one would assume the condition of newly created institutes would be worse. Yes and no. Data throws up some surprises. Four of the eight new IITs are on a par or even better than most of the older institutes. IIT-Hyderabad has only 1% teaching positions vacant while the corresponding figures are 26%, 46% and 57% for IIT Patna, Indore and Ropar respectively. The remaining four new colleges have more than 60% vacancy while IIT-Bhubaneshwar doesn’t have a single regular teacher against a sanctioned strength of 90.

Once again, the new NITs do even worse. There isn’t a single regular teacher in the 10 new NITs. According to the NIT Act and IIT Act, these institutions are declared as institutes of national importance and government spends thousands of crores of rupees to encourage technical education. For 2013-14, the budget estimates an expenditure of Rs 3,670 crore on IITs and of Rs 1,719 crore on NITs.

To make up for the shortage, the institutes are resorting to contracts, adjunct, visiting faculty and online mode of teaching. It was also recently reported that the government is planning to engage trainee teachers who will be selected from the top 15% of students from these institutes.