How many seats remained vacant in IITs after JEE 2024 counselling?

The few institutes where no seats remained vacant are IIT Bhubaneswar (496 seats), IIT Ropar (430 seats), IIT Goa (157 seats) and IIT Palakkad (200 seats), which includes the supernumerary seats. Last year, IIT Goa and IIT Palakkad had zero vacant seats, and IIT Gandhinagar, IIT Indore and IIT Bhubaneswar were also on the same list.

There are also a few institutes that claim to have allotted extra seats to candidates. These are IIT Bombay, Delhi, Indore, Hyderabad, Kanpur, Madras, Gandhinagar, Guwahati, and IIT Tirupati.

A few IITs have, however, not been able to fill to full capacity, as per data provided by JIC Report 2024. The IITs where less than 10 seats remained vacant were IIT Mandi (6 seats), IIT Kharagpur (4 seats), IIT Jodhpur (9 seats), IIT Roorkee (2 seats), one seat in IIT Bhilai, and IIT Jammu (8 seats).

Some institutes such as IIT Dharwad, IIT (BHU) Varanasi, IIT (ISM) Dhanbad and IIT Patna had more than 10 seats vacant.

When we compare the number of seats left vacant in these IIT with that from last year, we can see that except IIT Mandi, Kharagpur and IIT (BHU) Varanasi, the number of vacant seats has reduced in all other IITs. However, the reduction has not been significant. One of the reasons behind this can be the recent modifications made in IITs branch change system.

Starting this year, six IITs have scrapped the branch-change option offered to students at the end of the first year, bringing the total to 9.

The branch-change option at IITs allows students to switch to a new engineering stream at the end of the first two semesters (first year), provided they meet the desired cut-off pertaining to the Cumulative Grade Point Average (CGPA) score in the first year. Each branch in each IIT typically has its own cut-off scores to accept students from other streams.

IIT Madras. (File photo)

Starting this year, IIT Madras, IIT Kharagpur, IIT Dhanbad, IIT Dharwad, IIT Mandi and IIT Bhubaneswar have stopped this practice. IIT Bombay, IIT Hyderabad, and IIT Jammu discontinued it in 2023, 2021 and 2018, respectively.

Since some of the main IITs have discontinued this practice now, experts think that students who used to take admission in lesser popular courses at some of the leading IITs with the aim of then changing their branch at the end of their second semester, have now started prioritising second and third generation IITs, instead of settling for an undesired engineering branch.

“Majority of students select IIT and courses on the basis of the package. There are a few branches that remain popular due to this such as Computer Science Engineering. Earlier, students used to opt some lesser known courses in first generation IIT with the aim of shifting to their desired branch after the first year. But now that we have discontinued that practice, students have instead selected their desired engineering branch in the third generation IITs. The problem we now face is that the numbers for the lesser known courses have gone down due to this,” an IIT Mandi professor told indianexpress.com.