6 more NITs for North East India

6 more NITs for North East India

Six more NITs for Northeast

CHARU SUDAN KASTURI

New Delhi, May 26: Six of the nine new National Institutes of Technology promised by the UPA government will be set up in the Northeast, one in each state without an NIT at present. The human resource development ministry had written to the chief ministers of Manipur, Nagaland, Mizoram, Meghalaya, Arunachal Pradesh and Sikkim asking them to allocate land for the NITs, senior officials told The Telegraph. Assam and Tripura already have such institutes (in Silchar and Agartala). The ministry had also written to the Puducherri, Goa and Uttarakhand administration where NITs will be set up, sources said. The move follows controversial changes to the institutes’ admission policy last year that the northeastern states termed as discriminatory against regions traditionally backward in technical education. The NITs admit students on the basis of their performance in the All India Engineering Entrance Examination (AIEEE), a national-level test conducted by the CBSE. Till last year, 50 per cent of the seats in the NITs were filled by domiciled candidates of the state in which the NIT is located. The states without NITs were also allocated reserved seats at other NITs, based on their population. The rationale for the reservation was that most of the NITs were initially set up as Regional Engineering Colleges (RECs) aimed at developing technical education in specific states. A key precondition placed by states for the transfer of these institutes to the Centre as NITs was the continuation of reservation for students belonging to the respective states. Last year, the HRD ministry changed the admission policy for the NITs. The move was considered controversial for two reasons: The institutes are officially autonomous bodies and it is their apex decision making body, the NIT Council, and not the HRD ministry, that is empowered to alter the admission process. Secondly the new admission policy also ended state-specific reservations, stipulating that all seats would be filled up on the basis of a student’s merit determined by performance in the AIEEE. The end of reservations at the NITs was discriminatory against relatively less developed states, chief ministers of the northeastern states had complained to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, a Rajya Sabha MP from Assam. They feared that students from their states would no longer find minimum proportional representation at the NITs. (The Telegraph,27. 05.2009)