NITs With Merit

Beginning 2008-09, the rules of admission to the prestigious NITs, second only to the IITs, will change. Instead of getting admission to an NIT outside your state on the basis of your state rank, you will now get it on the basis of national rank. Which means that there is no statewise quota distribution, and students will be admitted purely on the basis of merit, ensuring that students who are higher in merit get seats, or at least better branches, than those of lower merit.

How does it work out? You see, under the previous system, 50% of the seats of an NIT were given on state rank basis to students from the same state, while the rest were distributed to the remaining states, with seats allocated to each state proportional to the population. Thus consider for example, that NIT Surat offers two seats to Assam students and four to Bengal students for a particular branch. If only one student applies from Assam, he gets that seat no matter what his rank. But if Bengal has ten students applying, only the top four get the seats, and the remaining six won't get it even if their ranks are all higher than the Assam student. If the second Assam seat is not taken, it remains unfilled, and won't even be offered to those six Bengal students.

In the new system, the 50% seats for the same NIT will remain, but the system of state quota for the remaining seats will be removed, and instead students may apply to any institute on the basis of their national rank. This means that the higher you are in merit, the wider the choice offered to you. So, the higher merit students are more likely to get a preferred branch in a preferred institute, and will not be shunted to lower preference branches simply due to state quota restrictions. Which overall means that merit is accorded more importance than it was earlier.

So what effects will this have? I had a talk with a friend and senior of mine working in Bangalore, and he highlighted a few things that hadn't occurred to me. First of all, national ranking is not evenly spread across the country's states. The higher national rankers tend to come from the north and east, because those people are generally those who appear for engineering entrance exams after dropping one or two years after school, meaning they are extremely well prepared for the exams, and tend to score higher, having the benefit of both content practice and time management practice. The entrance exam for the NITs (All India Engineering Entrance Examination, AIEEE) is taken by over one lakh students every year; the combined strength of seats offered by the NITs is a little less than one tenth that number. So if ten thousand seats are offered, and five thousand seats are given to students of the same state, and the remaining five thousand on basis of national ranking, it's natural that the bulk of the seats will go to students of the north and east (the ones who tend to score higher). Even after allowing for factors like students not going for their own NIT first, students joining the IITs or other private engineering colleges, students taking up medical school or other fields rather than engineering and the like, the proportion of students from the north will be more than students from the south.

Next, students of the south actually get a better deal upon joining local colleges, or at least colleges in Chennai or Bangalore. Placements there are said to be equally good as the NITs, or at least on a comparable level. Plus, the college is much nearer home, and not much travelling is thus required. Also, they get to live within a culture that they have grown up with, and the local language is also one that they are more likely to familiar with (given the tremendous multi-linguistic tendencies). They would rather go to these private colleges, never mind the high fees and the extra donations required to be paid. These students wouldn't bother even appearing for the AIEEE. Some still would obviously, because if they do well, AIEEE allows them entry to the NITs of Surathkal, Warangal, Trichy and Calicut, which they would certainly love to join.

So what does this spell all in all for the NITs? For the near future at least, the proportion of southie students would be greatly reduced, except in the southern NITs. The northern NITs would be populated by northie students and pseudo-southies. Diversity of the campus crowd thus goes for a toss.

Nearer home, what does this spell for our own NIT Surat? Interesting college politics. With hardly any substantial southie population, the bulk of college power falls to the hands of the northies. Particularly Gujarat, UP and Bihar, and I suppose the north east as well, seeing as these people would constitute a major chunk of the crowd. In a democracy, majority always has the power (regardless of whether it is right or wrong!), and with these people playing college politics the way they have always done so far, the scene looks set for an interesting politics session. Of course, the rule will begin to be implemented only this year, so the effect will be quite moderate, but two or three years down the line, the party should be in full swing.

Canteen Chronicle

Enter the most glorious hall of all those in college. The centre of life and living. The haven of that delight called food. That wonderful meeting place for all minds. The hangout for before college hours, after college hours, in between college hours, and of course during college hours(!). The college canteen.

Axe any course or department from the college, and you axe off a few students. Axe the canteen, and you axe the lifeline of the entire college, the thread holding it all together and providing survival to all its denizens. It is truly one of the few (arguably the only) parts of the college, which truly unites the college, having something of use for anyone (except the food of course) no matter what their taste.

The studious nerd can find a quiet corner where he can sit and study his notes, all colour-coded and arranged by subject on his laptop, referencing the internet to solve doubts (thanks to Wifi). The hot model of the college meanwhile, can find an entire hall full of people to admire her new stilettos. The gang of geeks can find good space for the weekly meeting of the local chapter of Hackers United. The ubiquitous gang o’ gals meanwhile can get their own table to sit and discuss the latest gossip and ways to spread it, over lunch.

The college jokers will always arrive there, since they’ll never be lacking an interested audience waiting to be entertained. The college tomboy will always someone to show off her new sneakers to, and someone else to practice her martial skills on. The college faculty have a place to relax and rejuvenate themselves, away from the claustrophobic office spaces allotted to them. The omnipresent truants meanwhile have a place where they can feel welcome and at home, during the usual routine of truancy (which can be quite taxing!).

Truly, the canteen represents unity in diversity. Analogous to college culture, every college also has a typical canteen culture. A college with a canteen and without canteen culture has something seriously wrong with it.

The canteen is where celebrations begin, right from birthday treats all the way upto pre-graduation revelry (in the countdown to the day they leave college) including but not limited to India’s success in the latest cricket or football match. It is where news is passed on and gossip is spread, right from exam dates upto the juicier details of the faculty members’ profiles on Orkut and Facebook. It is where college traditions begin: introduction to freshers and farewell to final year seniors. It’s where students pick up a quick fix breakfast before running off to exams, and where they return for a restoring lunch, groaning after a disastrous paper.

If you want to measure the pulse of a college, you need to know its crowd. And to know that crowd, visit the canteen where that crowd hangs out. You’re sure to get a taste of a slice of the life of the people there. And, a delicious morsel it can prove itself to be.