New Delhi, June 21
The Ministry of HRD today came under renewed pressure from the IIT faculty to advance its proposed common engineering entrance test (CET) beyond 2013, with the Senate of the IIT-Delhi rejecting the idea and resolving to conduct its own test next year.

After a three-hour meeting, the IIT-Delhi Senate unanimously decided to reject the CET decision taken on May 28 by the IIT Council that HRD Minister Kapil Sibal chairs.

The CET envisages a common engineering entrance exam for students across India by scrapping the current JEE-IIT and the AIEEE examinations.

In rejecting the CET today, the faculty of the IIT-Delhi followed the IIT-Kanpur Senate that was the first one to have taken the unprecedented step of turning down an IIT Council decision on the ground that the council disregarded the academic autonomy of the seven IIT Senates by not conceding to their demand of holding the common entrance test from 2014 or later.

“We have resolved to reject the IIT Council decision to conduct the Joint Entrance Examination Main and Advanced with weightage for school board marks from 2013. We have decided to hold our own exam for entry to IIT-Delhi in 2013. The Senate has empowered its Chairman (IIT director) to constitute a committee for the purpose of holding the test,” said All-India IIT Faculty Federation Secretary Prof AK Mittal, who is also a member of IIT-Delhi Senate.

IIT-Delhi Senate further said that it would work with like-minded IITs to hold a separate test (apart from the CET) next year to conduct admissions to the coveted technical institutes.

Shortly the Senates of IIT-Kharagpur and Bombay are also expected to meet to decide what course they wanted to adopt for engineering admissions next year.

The IIT-Delhi Senate said it would be willing to collaborate with the IIT-Kanpur and other IITs.

The IIT Act, 1961, empowers IIT Senates to conduct admissions to undergraduate courses to each institute. In fact, the Senate of every IIT is empowered to hold its own admission test separately, as was the practice in the initial years of IIT existence.

Later on, for the sake of convenience and uniformity, the IIT Senates came together and decided to conduct a Joint Entrance Exam.