20% of IITians from Rajasthan, combined AP comes second
Hemali Chhapia-Shah & Yogita Rao
Mumbai:
TNN
Maharashtra has increased its dominance among the IITs. It ranked third this year in terms of number of students it sends to the premier institutes -up one place from 2014.
The vast majority of candidates who joined the IITs -1,965 of 9,974 -came from the coaching towns of Rajasthan, followed by those from Andhra Pradesh and Telangana put together, as they were part of the unified state of Andhra Pradesh till 2014.Home to 871 candidates, Maharashtra came a close third.
Last year, the state ranked fourth in terms of qualifying students.
Again, almost 60% of those who made it to the IITs are from CBSE schools, followed by those from AP and Telangana boards. Like the state, the Maharashtra board, too, stood third; it sent 678 candidates.
There was a time when IITs prided themselves in managing to draw the best from across the country . Now, say several experts, the JEE has lost its mojo. As many as 75% of the candidates were from urban areas and the rest from rural parts. At the other end of the spectrum, 18 foreign candidates, most of them with a Person of Indian Origin (PIO) status, have been admitted to the IITs compared with merely two in 2014. Of the 18, four got into IIT-Madras and two each in the institutes at Mumbai, Delhi and Kharagpur.
The gates that lead to an IIT are narrow. Each candidate needs to elbow out at least hundreds of others to get beyond the entry point. It is this rush that stokes the coaching industry . This year, of the 9,974 who joined the IITs, 50% said they took professional help to prepare for the entrance test (JEE).Among them, 4,757 went to a coaching class, 112 preferred to take individual coaching, 40 prepared via a correspondence course and 173 ticked on other modes of preparation.
