IIT council adds 779 more seats exclusively for female candidates in session 2018

With an aim to improve the gender ratio in its B.Tech programme, Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) have added 779 more seats in the 2018 academic session exclusively for women.

Additionally, female candidates will be allowed to take admission through the normal intake of seats otherwise.

The decision was originally announced last year by the IIT council while the exact number of supernumerary seats has been announced on Saturday.

However, the number of seats is likely to be increased every year till the number of female students reaches 20%. Currently, less than 10% women are admitted in the IITs across the country.

Out of the 779 seats, IIT Kharagpur has the largest chunk of 113 seats following IIT-Dhanbad (95 seats), IIT-Kanpur (79), IIT-BHU (76), IIT-Roorkee (68), IIT-Delhi (59), IIT-Bombay (58) and IIT Guwahati (57), reported a leading daily.

The move is expected to almost double the number of women candidates as opposed to past few years, according to the IIT council.

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The decision was taken after sub-committee of the Joint Admission Board (JAB) in 2017 observed that every year enough number of women clear JEE (Advanced) to achieve a ratio of 45% but the enrollment of the female candidates are much lower due to systematic societal biases.

The JEE (Mains) 2018 examination is taking place on Sunday, April 8, in pen-paper (offline) mode while the computer-based (online) examination is scheduled to take place on April 15 and April 16, 2018.

This year JEE (Advanced) will be conducted on May 20.