The IIT faculty federation, opposed to the proposed common entrance test (CET) for admission in IITs and other centrally-funded technical institutes, will meet Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh on Friday.
The members of the All India Faculty Federation of the IITs, which had written to Manmohan Singh earlier this month, yesterday met officials of Prime Minister’s Office on the issue and sought a roll back of the decision.
Today’s meeting with Dr Manmohan Singh assumes significance in the wake of HRD Minister Kapil Sibal virtually ruling out going back on the Centre’s new proposal.
AIIITFF had written to the Prime Minister on May 31 saying that “each IIT is an individual and independent academic entity and should reserve its right to follow its own norms with regards to admissions and other academic matter”.
Sibal, who is currently on a visit to the US, has said that the government has no intent to impinge on the autonomy of the IITs.
The government had on May 28 announced that from 2013, aspiring candidates for IITs and other central institutes like NITs and IIITs will have to sit under a new format of common entrance test, which will also take the plus-two board results into consideration.
Sibal had claimed that it was approved without dissent at a council consisting of the IITs, the IIITs and the NITs.
Delhi IIT alumni association also shared a letter with the press and addressed to HRD Minister Kapil Sibal, which shows IIT Kanpur’s dissent over the council’s decision of adopting the new test format.
Later in a statement yesterday, the federation demanded that since the new common entrance test was decided upon without proper consultation process, each IIT should now be given choices of accepting the proposed test as it is, accept it with specific conditions or riders or reject the proposed test and have own admission processes.
It reiterated that the any changes should be only from 2014 or later and the current test pattern such as JEE, AIEEE, other state entrance test should continue at least for the year 2013.
The federation insisted that board performance should be used as cut-off only instead of giving weightage to it after the process of normalisation as has been proposed under the new format.
The federation also contested the two-tier format for the common test, (appearing in both main and advance test) stating that only the main be used for all institutes except the IITs to select students.
It said the advance test should be required only for the IITs.
Sibal on his part has said the decision comes after two years of deliberations with the IITs and is a unanimous one. The minister, however, said that he is willing to talk with dissenting bodies on the issue.
—PTI—-