IIT Gandhinagar has topped the placement list with 88.31% placements recorded in the academic year 2016-17, the final placement data across IITs has revealed
New and lesser known Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) situated in smaller towns have left behind the old, established ones in the race of campus placements this year.
IIT Gandhinagar — a second generation IIT (established in 2008) — has topped the placement list with 88.31 per cent placements recorded in the academic year 2016-17, the final placement data across IITs has revealed.
As per the data available with the Ministry of Human Resource Development, 3 new IITS —Ropar, Indore and Gandhinagar — feature in the top five IITs that recorded maximum placements this year. Of the older ones, IIT Delhi ranked at two and IIT (previously ISM) Dhanbad stood at four.
In fact, IIT Mandi and IIT Patna also performed better than a number of established IITs like Bombay and Madras. According to the official data, IIT Mandi recorded 73.96 per cent placement this year and Patna recorded over 74 per cent placement, whereas Bombay and Madras recorded 73.39 and 70.39 per cent respectively.
Increasing placements in newer IITs has become a trend over the last three years, in 2015-16, IIT Indore had recorded 100 per cent placement. Officials attribute this to the older, established IITs focusing more on filing patents and focusing on research rather than placements.
"One of the main reasons that placement at new IITs is on a rise is because they are adding more seats at undergraduate levels and focusing only on placements, since they do not have enough infrastructure to focus on research and start-ups," a placement official from IIT Delhi said.
With the government pushing education institutes to get a place in international rankings, older institutes are busy filing patents, which is one of the important criteria for scoring in international ranks.
"In the last three years, number of patents filed by IITs have increased from 494 in the year 2014, to 563 in the year 2016. Maximum contributors to this have been the older IITs. Madras filed the maximum number of patents at 325, followed by Bombay, Kharagpur and Kanpur," said a senior official in HRD Ministry.
"This is as per government's plans of making the older IITs focus more on research and catapulting them in world rankings," he added.
There are 23 IITs in the country, including the older, established ones -- Madras, Delhi, Kharagpur, Bombay, Kanpur, Roorkee and Varanasi, the second generation IITs including -- IIT Ropar, Bhubaneswar, Gandhinagar, Hyderabad, Jodhpur, Patna, Indore and Mandi., that came up in the year 2008 and 2009.
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