IITs give in, JEE, AIEEE to merge

Formal meeting of IIT Council likely in February; Class 12 marks, entrance exam score to have equal weightage.

Updated on: Jan 29, 2012, 01:32:51 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The Ministry of human resource development will soon call a meeting of Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) Council to stamp a decision to merge the IIT-Joint Entrance Exam (JEE) and All India Engineering Entrance Exam (AIEEE) conducted by the Central Board of Secondary Education.

After much resistance, the IITs have agreed to join the ministry’s bid to have a common entrance examination for all engineering colleges in the country. This only happened after there was an agreement that several elements of IIT-JEE will be part of the new national common examination.

“The new entrance examination will have many elements of IIT-JEE as we want to ensure that the best brains join our institutes,” said an IIT director requesting anonymity, after a meeting of select IIT directors with HRD minister Kapil Sibal.

A formal meeting of the IIT Council to stamp the merger is expected in February.

IIT Kanpur director Sanjay Dande made a presentation on features of the new entrance examination aimed to evaluate skills of a student objectively.

A student’s Class 12 marks and entrance exam score will have equal weightage.

The new examination will be conducted by a joint committee of IIT and Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE), which conducts AIEEE, and will cover all central government engineering colleges and those in seven states such as Haryana, Himachal Pradesh and West Bengal, which had opted to take students on the basis of the AIEEE score.

There are 15 IITs, four Indian Institutes of Information Technology and 20 National Institutes of Technology in the country.

The HRD ministry believes that more states could join in the future and it will try to bring them on board at a meeting of state education ministers on February 15. Over 15 lakh students, including 4.85 lakh for IIT-JEE, appear for different engineering entrance tests in the country every year.

A student wanting admission in an engineering college has to take three to five entrance exams depending on the stream.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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