New Delhi, June 8
The IIT Kanpur faculty unanimously rejected the move to hold a single engineering entrance test for admission to central technical institutions from 2013 and said it will conduct its own test for admissions to UG courses.

In doing so, IIT Kanpur led the way for others to reject the new test and hold their own exams. If most IIT senates (there are seven) decide to hold a Joint Entrance Exam, they would stand excused from the single test which Sibal had planned to be pan Indian.

The senates of IIT Delhi and Bombay are expected to meet any time soon to take a call on the matter. Already, All India IIT Faculty Federation has written to the PM, accusing Sibal of eroding their academic autonomy. They are likely to meet the PM next week.

Meanwhile, the IIT Kanpur senate today discussed the May 28 decision of the IIT council (policy-making body for IITs) to conduct a single test by scrapping JEE and resolved “to record its forceful dissent of the council resolution related to JEE”.

The senate asked Director of IIT Kanpur Sanjay Dhande (who was by Sibal’s side two days ago when the common test decision was announced) to send his dissent in writing to the HRD Minister.

The senate resolution further reads, “The recent IIT Council proposal on admissions to IITs is academically and methodically unsound and in violation of the Institutes of Technology Act 1961 and IIT Kanpur ordinances. Invoking Ordinance 3.2, the senate resolves that IIT Kanpur will conduct the entrance examination for admissions to its undergraduate programmes in 2013.”

Prof YN Mohapatra, member of IIT Kanpur senate, told TNS, “We have also resolved to constitute a committee to conduct JEE 2013 by IIT Kanpur. To the extent possible, we will coordinate with other IITs to hold a common JEE. Today, we have acted to restore our autonomy, which is provisioned in the IIT Act and which the IIT Council seeks to undermine.”

“The Ministry is pushing an unsound proposal in haste. There is no clarity if the weightage of school marks will work. We had said we will use the school marks and the test’s main component to screen 50,000 students and subject the screened to an advanced test for final admissions. But IIT Council says everyone who sits for the single test will also sit for the advanced test. Why should you force 20 lakh students to take the advanced test when annually, only about five lakh students take IIT-JEE?” Mohapatra, spokesperson for the senate, said. Sibal says four of seven IIT senates have fully backed the single test proposal in the current form as passed by IIT Council.