IITs To Reserve 20% Seats For Women To Create Gender Balance In Tech Education  

New Delhi: The Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), as part of the central government’s goal of creating a gender balance in technical education, will reserve a fifth of their seats – 20 per cent, for women students from academic year 2020-21.

The percentage of reserved seats will go up from the current 17 per cent to 20 per cent from academic year 2020-21. The announcement was made by IIT-Delhi on March 9, which is the conducting authority for the Joint Entrance Exam (Advanced), the gateway to admission across the 23 IITs.

The quota though is supernumerary in nature, which means it won’t come at the cost of unreserved seats. Each institute will have to increase the overall number of seats to make sure the enhanced quota doesn’t cut the number of unreserved seats.

“A decision has been taken at the level of the IIT Council (which takes all policy decisions related to IITs) to, inter alia, improve the gender balance in the undergraduate programs at the IITs to at least 20 percent in 2020-21 by creating supernumerary seats specifically for female candidates,” said IIT-Delhi in an information brochure released on the JEE (Advanced) website.

“To achieve this objective, supernumerary seats will thus be created and offered to female candidates for improving the gender balance in the undergraduate programs in IITs,” it added. The exact number of seats on offer will be calculated by each institute once the results are out.

The seats, however, will only be offered to women who have cleared the JEE (Advanced), and the admissions based on their performance in the test, reports theprint.in.

Encouraging women to go for STEM

The participation of women in the STEM fields — science, technology, engineering and maths — in India has been low. According to statistics published by the Department of Science and Technology, in 2017-18, women comprised only 14 per cent of the workforce in research and development.

This is one of the reasons the central government is working at the foundation level to boost women’s presence in technical education.

In 2018, the central government decided to add supernumerary seats for women in IITs. In the first year of implementation, 2018-19, 14 per cent of seats were added, going up to 17 per cent in 2019-20 and 20 per cent in 2020-21.