TNN Aug 3, 2008, 07.36am IST
MUMBAI/CHENNAI: Electrical and civil engineering are making a comeback as the courses of choice at the IITs.
While computer science still pulled a large chunk of the JEE toppers, this year, the stream seems to have a competitor . Of the top 100 Joint Entrance Exam-2008 rankers, about 15% have opted for electrical engineering, when they could have got a computer science seat. This stream opened at rank 11 in IIT-Madras and at rank 36 in Bombay. IIT Madras director M S Ananth had reasoned this to: "Telecommunication is on the top, at least neck-to-neck with computer science. Electrical engineering is as much a rage as computer science, at least in the IITs. After that we have most students opt for mechanical engineering.''
Statistics on the opening and closing ranks of candidates admitted to the IITs this year on the basis of their scores in the JEE also reveal that in the mechanical engineering course offered at IIT Kanpur, the opening rank in the general category is 860 against last year's 804. While in 2007, admission to the course was closed at a rank of 1,044, this year a candidate who was ranked 1,139 in the general category has also been taken into the stream.
However, in the seats reserved for candidates belonging to Scheduled Castes, the race was tougher this time. Last year, candidates ranked between 218 and 222 made it to Mechanical Engineering, while now the admission opened at 151st rank but ended with the 360th rank.
Civil engineering seems to have scaled up. The stream opened at a rank almost 500 slots up at the Powai campus, as also over 400 ranks up on the Chennai campus. Admissions to the chemical engineering course that is offered at the IITs in Bombay, Delhi, Kanpur, Kharagpur, Madras, Guwahati and Roorkee also opened at a lower rank in the general category. However, the closing ranks were higher except in Kharagpur, Guwahati and Roorkee.
"Last year, the first candidate to be admitted to IIT Bombay in chemical engineering was ranked 222, while this time, a candidate who was ranked 496 was the first to enter the institution in this stream,'' a professor said. The trend for the subject was slightly different at the Institution of Technology Banaras Hindu University (ITBHU ) in Varanasi.