With its stellar placements and impressive ranking at the national- level, the National Institute of Technology, Calicut, (NIT-C) has attracted more foreign students for admission to undergraduate, postgraduate and doctoral programmes this year.
In fact, the number of applicants has made a quantum jump - over 10 times the total number of aspirants when compared to the previous year.
As many as 283 foreign students have applied for B.Tech and B.Arch courses, 108 for M.Tech and M.Plan and 18 for PhD programmes. Last year , the total applicants were 40 including 30 for undergraduate programmes.
Prof. Lity Alen Varghese , chairperson, UG Admissions and Dr. G. Sreelekha, chairperson, Post Graduate Admissions said that most of the applicants were from the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) countries, Ghana, Vietnam, Syria and a few from European Union. The foreign students had applied online for the courses via the Indian Council for Cultural Relations ( ICCR) an autonomous body under the Ministry of External External Affairs (MEA), they said.
The quota for undergraduate programmes was 16 while the seats allotted in the post graduate in the Ph.D caterorgies were 36 and 15 respectively.
“We have shortlisted candidates and the list has been submitted to the ICCR. The majority of the B.Tech aspirants have opted for computer science and electronics disciplines,” Prof. Varghese said.
However the case was different for M.Tech courses where the candidates chose conventional streams including civil, mechanical and electrical engineering.
“The shortlisted candidates for both postgraduate and Ph.D programmes will be submitted to the ICCR shortly,” Dr. Sreelekha said.
Last year only nine students including one from Botswana were admitted to the B.Tech course in the ICCR scheme and two candidates were sponsored under the welfare scheme of the MEA. Incidentally , out of the four short-listed candidates for the M.Tech course only two joined last year.
Dr. P. S. Sathidevi, Director-in-charge, NITC attributed the spurt in number of foreign candidates seeking admission to multiple reasons including the ranking of the institute that stood at 23rd in the engineering and 3rd in the architecture category at the national level. Possibly the increase in scholarships and facilities at the institute had also attracted a large number of students, she said.
However, from this year onwards admission to B.Tech courses for category under Direct Admission of Students (DASA) for NRI, PIO (Person of Indian Origin) and OCI ( Overseas Citizen of India) should qualify JEE Main and not through Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT), Dr. Sathidevi said.
The ICCR annually awards about 3,500 scholarships under 23 different schemes to foreign students from about 180 countries. Six schemes are funded by ICCR and others administered on behalf of the MEA and Ministry of Ayush.
