JOIN USAll-India engg CET on anvil
Announcing this after a five-hour meeting of the Council of IITs, which has also agreed to the proposal, Union Human Resource Development Minister Kapil Sibal, however, said that the proposed move to have in place a common entrance test for all engineering colleges across the country will be subject to approval by the Central Advisory Board of Education (CABE) and the state governments.
“We have decided there shall be one exam and will try and put that into operation from 2013,” Sibal said.
The Council of IITs indicated that students who get admission to the premier engineering schools might end up paying a substantial amount towards cost of their education.
In this context, Sibal said though the tuition fee would remain at Rs 50,000 per annum, the students will have to pay Rs 7.5 lakh (Rs 1.5 lakh per year) at the end of their respective programmes. The additional amount will be a payback to meet the cost incurred by the IITs on each student. On the issue of hiking tuition fee as recommended by the Anil Kakodkar committee, he said that “fee would remain the same at Rs 50,000 per annum.”
But he said students, excluding STs and OBCs, would “pay back” the amount “which is the difference between the fee deposited and what the IIT spends on him.” Sibal exuded confidence on the viability of the “pay-back” scheme in instalments, saying the DMAT system would be utilised for this.
He, however, made it clear that the “payback” scheme “won’t be applicable to those who enrol in MTech and PhD programmes or those recruited as faculty in IIT.” A Finance Ministry’s nod would be needed to put in effect the scheme.
The cost factor for an IIT for each students now stands at around Rs 8 lakh against the Rs 2 lakh paid over the entire duration of the BTech programme. He said the implementation of the Kakodkar panel recommendation, which sought to raise the tuition fee to Rs 2 lakh a year, was “not possible”, in the interests of all sections of society.
In the context of the pan-India common entrance test, Sibal said an all-India merit list would be prepared based on the combined weightage given to Class XII examinations and to a common test. The test would examine a students’ logic and non-subject matters.
He said weightage would be given to the marks obtained in Class XII boards after the results “are equalised for which Indian Statistical Institute will put in place a mathematical formula for equalisation.”