Students of centrally-funded technical institutes, who have scored over 70 per cent marks in semester examination, can now pursue post-doctoral programmes at the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) without appearing for the Graduate Aptitude Test Examination (GATE).

They will also be eligible for assistantship or fellowship at the IITs without a GATE score, the Council of the premier institute decided in a meeting headed by Human Resource Development Minister M M Pallam Raju here on Monday.

Students pursing BTech from institutes which are not centrally-funded, will also be eligible for admission to the PhD programmes at the IITs without a GATE score, if their cumulative grade point average (CGPA) is over 7.0 after third year. If such students want to avail scholarship to pursue post-doctoral programmes at the IITs, GATE score will be required, Raju said.

“All others will have to appear for GATE to get into MTech and PhD programs in IITs,” he added.

The Council decided to relax conditions for enrolment to increase the number of post-doctorates from the present 3,000 per year to 10,000 by 2020, he added. The Council also decided to introduce a PhD programme at the IITs for working persons or teachers in engineering colleges. “The course requirement will be fulfilled through courses to be delivered remotely using the National Knowledge Network (NKN),” the minister said.

In view of the faculty crunch in technical institutes, the council also approved a scheme to train graduating engineers as teachers, jointly with the National Institute of Technology. Under this scheme, the top 15 per cent students from technical institutes, either funded by the Centre or approved by the AICTE and the UGC, will be eligible to take up the training programme.

The National Institutes of Technology will identify and implement the initial screening criteria for selection of potential candidates, which is being worked out.

“They will be engaged as trainee teachers at NITs. Initially they will assist in teaching.

They will simultaneously go through part-time MTech and PhD programs of IITs to acquire higher academic qualifications, which is a prerequisite for being a faculty at the NITs,” Raju said.