New Delhi, February 8
In a revelation that may dishearten those who could not make it into the IITs in recent years, several high-in-demand seats at these premier institutes have been found lying vacant session after session.

In the Joint Entrance Exam of 2006, institutes and branches that were more in demand were artificially shown as filled though data later procured under the Right to Information Act showed that these seats were actually not occupied.

Again in JEE 2008, hundreds of seats, even in General Category, were vacant across IITs despite the fierce competition for entry. Reason -- IITs, until the last year, were conducting a single round of counselling even if it meant allowing prized seats in plum branches to go unclaimed despite demand.

Even today, five to 20 per cent seats in General Category are estimated to be vacant in IITs, if the recent data supplied by the Ministry of Human Resource Development under the RTI Act is anything to go by. Data also hints at instances in the past, especially until 2005, where IIT seats at certain locations were being filled through faculty wards, who never qualified for JEE.

It was for the first time in 2009 that the issue of vacancy of seats in the much-desired IITs came to light when it was found that 50 to 100 vacancies were allowed to exist every year despite there being a mad rush for entry to these technical institutes. Documents with The Tribune show that in IIT Kanpur, one seat in computer engineering was vacant (top 60 rankers get this branch); textile engineering and biotechnology seats were vacant in IIT Delhi; IIT Kharagpur had the highest number of vacant seats in five-year MSc courses, including in preferred streams like physics and chemistry (these seats go to candidates ranked between 500 and 3,000). IIT Roorkee also had vacancies.

It was only after the information on vacancies in coveted branches became public that the IITs, following Supreme Court’s intervention last year, conducted a second round of counseling. Some seats continue to go waste in the absence of a fully online counselling and a wait-listing provision.