Second Generation IITs: Increase In International and Women Students Over Last Seven Years

IIT Gender Ratio

Over the seven years, the presence of women students in the eight new second generation IITs has risen, both in percentage and absolute numbers.

However, within this group, numbers and proportions varied and fluctuated before 2017-18.

IIT Hyderabad had more than 16 percent female students for most years and also the highest percentage of female students among all the new IITs till 2021. And for 2017-19, IIT Patna had only 36 female students out of a total of 783.

In 2015-15 IIT Patna remained the lowest among all eight IITs for female participation, but in the latest years it held the top position. While IIT Jodhpur had the lowest female candidates in 2021-22.

Chart title | Second Generation IITs: Presence Of Women (In %)

Also Read | Top NITs: Women’s Presence In The Best NITs Has Declined Over Seven Years

New IITs: Candidates From Inside And Outside The State

No pattern emerges from the changes in the percentage of students enrolling from within the state – unlike the National Institutes of Technology (NIT), IITs do not reserve seats for the home state. But for a particular institute, the percentage more or less remained the same, except in the case of IIT Patna where the percentage of students from within Bihar rose by close to 10 percentage points in 2022. Later it decreased by two per cent in the latest year.

The table below shows the percentage based on the total enrollment in all four years of the undergraduate programmes (BTech) in a particular academic year.

IIT: Students From Within State (In %)

IIT: SC, ST, OBC, EWS Quotas

Some level of diversity in the IITs is guaranteed by the legally-mandated reservation policy. The 10 percent EWS quota was introduced in early 2019 but implemented in the IITs in phases. Therefore, the 2019-2020 data will reflect the presence of EWS quota only in the first-year students of all undergraduates enrolled in that year. However, like with the NITs, that is not the only issue with the EWS statistics.

The new quota was for upper-caste candidates with an annual family income of less than Rs 8 lakh. It is not clear from available documents how the NIRF or the IITs were defining “EWS” before 2019 although they have furnished numbers for it since NIRF 2016.

The absolute numbers submitted by the institutes for ranking suggest that the proportion of students from economically backward backgrounds has been declining in some IITs since the quota was introduced. In some – IIT Patna and IIT Mandi – the percentage of EWS students has fluctuated wildly. Considering that the composition of a single batch of students remains more-or-less stable for the four years the programme lasts, and that drastic changes to the student community as a whole can occur only when one batch graduates and another joins, it is difficult to see how the representation of EWS students can drop by over 19 percentage points in a single year (IIT Jodhpur) or rise by over 21 percentage points (IIT Bhubaneswar).

However, the percentage representation, based on the absolute numbers in the NIRF document, is given below.

Second Generation IIT: Economically Backward Students (In %)

Quotas for SC, ST and OBC add up to 49.5 percent of seats. Here, most of the IITs have done better than NITs, with the representation of these groups crossing 50 percent in several years.

In the case of IIT Jodhpur, the 2016-17 data yields a 1.7 percent representation for socially backward groups. For the same reason explained above for EWS, neither of these figures is entirely plausible.

Second Generation IITs: SC, ST, OBC Quotas

Also Read | NIT Placements: Under 83% BTech Students Placed Across Top we NITs Over 7 Years

Participation of Foreign students

In 2019-20, only nine foreign students were enrolled in the eight second generation IIT, all of them in IIT Hyderabad. But by 2021-22, around 21 students were admitted, out of them 18 were in IIT Hyderabad, two were in IIT Gandhinagar and one student was in IIT Mandi.