89 seats remain vacant in IIIT and NIT, Kurukshetra

KURUKSHETRA: Though candidates seeking admission in the prestigious National Institute of Technology (NIT) and the Indian Institute of Information and Technology (IIIT) run from pillar to post to ensure their seat in these institutes, several seats remain vacant in these institutions due to faulty admission process every year.

As all six rounds of admission were over on July 26, as many as 67 seats out of 832 seats for Btech courses in the NIT Kurukshetra and 22 seats out of 90 seats of Btech in IIIT Sonepat, which is temporarily operational at NIT Campus here, are still vacant.

Sources said that last year also, 19 seats remained vacant in the NIT and 12 remained vacant in IIIT, but this time the number has gone up as students who had booked their seats did not turn up for admission.

The NIT has also given one more day to the students to report by July 27 evening, but the students did not turn up, the sources said.

Moreover, several seats are also vacant in other categories as out of 35 seats reserved for direct admission for foreign students, only 13 are filled and 22 seats are vacant. Similarly, out of 35 seats reserved for the Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR), 28 are under this category. But only 20 students -- 10 from Afghanistan and 10 from Bhutan -- reached for admission.

Talking to Hindustan Times, Prof Baldev Setia, dean academic, NIT Kurukshetra said, “Some seats remained unfilled as the students did not come for reporting by the given time”.

The officials are not ready to speak against the faulty admission process openly, but some officials of NIT, requesting anonymity, said the admission process had some flaws. Some students book their seats in more than one institution, depriving the students with inferior ranks from admission.

Though there is a rule for deduction from the admission fee, but most of the students do not even bother about entire fee of `47,000.

The officials suggested that rights of counselling for admission in all institutions should be given to only one body and also there should be a special round to fill the vacant seats.