Monday, April 14, 2008

The doubtful future! Updated

I talked about the quota issue in one of my recent posts (Quota, please provide it to common people) and the gravity of the effects this will have on the quality of engineers in India. And just a few days after that comes a shocking news from IIT's.
Let me give a brief introduction before I start with the recent announcement by IIT's.
It was decided that 27% of the seats in IIT's would be reserved for the backward classes, which would be increased to a, hold your jaws, 50% gradually, by around 2010. During this process new seats would be created in IIT's of which nearly none would be available to the general caste, those new seats will be given to backward classes. It angered students to the bones, who were already facing such stiff competition for the very few seats in IIT's, more than 3 lack students compete for 5,000 seats already (new IIT's have opened after this post taking the number to around 7000, but the number of students giving the exam will also go up), as for the reserved seats, it is said that 50% never fill up due to lack of talented students and out of the selected many are shown the door out due to extremely poor performance. Students from backward classes are not even able to meet the criterion, two third marks of what the last student in general pool to be admitted secured, which creates doubts as to what kind of students are getting into IIT's.
Now, I come to the announcement, IIT's have decided to lower the cut-off for the reserved category further, students in the reserved category were being admitted at a score of about 125 out of 489 and this is set to go further down which is the most shameful thing for what are known as the top technical institutes of India. Students with nearly no capability, scoring under 25% in Physics, Chemistry and Maths will be admitted to India's premier institutes and students who deserve being in IIT and score much higher than these backward class fellows will be denied education in IIT, and what is most surprising is that in this teeth-to-teeth competition there will be empty seats, the ones those were not filled due to lack of candidates with a good score in the backward pool.
This is the absolutely wrong way of trying to get the backward class into the mainstream, you can't kill genuine talent for that. What is the need of the situation is a system of identifying the talented lot among the young minds, through tests, olympiads, and then training them in good schools though quota and letting them compete on their own with the main stream in exams like IIT-JEE. And this has to be done from the lower level, this process should be complete by 10th grade and after that talent should be left to compete not caste.
One thing that is killing India is bad politics, not politics itself but bad politics, nobody realy cares for others, everyone is concerned about himself. And same is in education sector, the ministers don't even care what the result will be, don't realize what they are doing, they don't give the fact a thought that they are playing with the future of a nation, all they want is votes. We need change!

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