New Delhi: Blame it on the lack of awareness among students or popularity of basic engineering courses, several specialized courses at the Indian Institute of Technology (BHU) and Indian School of Mining at Dhanbad, are struggling to enroll students.
This has made these two premier institutes top the list of IITs with maximum vacant seats, despite efforts to spread awareness about these new courses among the students.
While the IIT-BHU offers a BTech degree in Pharmaceutical Engineering, the Dhanbad institute has courses in Mining Machinery, Fuel & Mineral and Environmental Engineering.
BHU & Dhanbad Top List for Vacant Seats
Vacancies across IITs have shown a four-year high this academic session, with Varanasi and Dhanbad leading the pack for the 2017-18 batch. It has been reported that a total of 121 seats are lying vacant with the IITs despite several rounds of admission as compared to 96 seats from last year.
IIT-BHU had the maximum number of empty seats, 32, followed by IIT-Dhanbad (Indian School of Mines) with 23 vacancies, which is same as last year. However, Varanasi has shown marked improvement from last year’s 38.
IIT-BHU is the only IIT that offers a 4-year undergraduate (UG) and 5-year Integrated Dual Degree (IDD) program in Pharmaceutical Engineering.
Speaking to News 18 Sushil K Singh Professor, Head Department of Pharmaceutical Engineering and Technology said, “As the pharmacy program primarily deals with Biology-related subjects, it has not been a primary choice of engineering aspirants as they do not have a biology background.”
Further, the department head added that the degree that was being offered initially was of Bachelors in Pharm (till the year 2013), which they have now changed to BTech in Pharmaceutical Engineering.
“The students who had initially opted for this Bachelor’s program or IDD left it for other BTech programmes during the second and third rounds of counselling and the seats fell vacant,” Singh added.
The Dhanbad institute is facing a similar crisis, says Dean (Academic), Professor G Udayabhanu. “Just like IIT-BHU we also have certain specialized courses like Mineral machinery, Fuel and Mining. They haven’t managed to fare well among the students leaving us with too many vacant seats.”
However, the college authorities are hoping to put in place a plan to deal with these vacancies in the next years.
Steps Taken to Address the Problem
In order to minimize the number of drop-outs, the BHU department has brought about some restructuring in both the UG programme as well as the 5-year IDD course. Emphasis on a research-oriented approach would allow students to hone all-round skills in Pharmaceutical Engineering, Science, Humanities, Language and Management.
This also includes a basic science course like Biology and Biochemistry at the first-year level to enable the students to cope up with the advanced Biology-related courses in the Pharmaceutical Engineering programme.
Rajeev Sangal, Director IIT-BHU, said, “The current numbers have improved as compared to the previous years. Last year there were 38 vacancies, now it is 32 and if we see the number of vacant seats in the past, it was even higher. Due to these concerted efforts we are progressing and will be able to get more students in our specialized courses in future.”
On the other hand, IIT-Dhanbad is also planning to hold a review meeting after the admission process is complete and come out with a plan by the end of the month, to deal with vacancies in special courses.
“Maybe we will be reviewing the number of seats and some regulations from the next session, however, the vacancies of this year will remain so,” said Udayabhanu.
Special Courses vs Basic Courses
Udayabhanu said, “Our specialized courses have a 100% placement record, especially for the mining machinery course. The other special courses have over 75% of placement record,”
BHU’s UG, IDD, PG and Doctoral students in Pharma get placed well in both core and non-core sectors, and at par with other engineering students of the institute.
Some of the top recruiters in the core sector include: Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories, Sun Pharmaceuticals, Lupin Research Park, Jubilant Generics, Mylan Pharmaceuticals among others.
Ironically, while IIT-Delhi does not have any specialized courses, they still have more footfall with general courses like Civil, Mechanical, Electrical Engineering etc.
Arvind Nema, who is the JEE chairman at IIT Delhi said, “Our basic courses are more popular because students like to keep their options open and then go for MBA or further studies.”
Students are not making decisions at school level and are waiting for the degree in these basic courses before deciding on what job matters to them.
In order to spread awareness among the students on specialized courses the chairman added, “We have a new initiative ‘Professors Assisted Learning’, which will start at school-level to educate the students about these special streams.”
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