2.99 Lakh Vie For 5,444 IIT Seats

New Delhi, May 22 (UNI) Nearly 2.99 lakhs aspirants took a joint extrance examination for 5,444 seats in India's ace schools of technology and mines, Parliament was told today.

The schools covered: Indian Institutes of Technology at New Delhi, Kharagpur, Mumbai, Roorkee, Kanpur and Chennai, School of Mines, Dhanbad, and Technology Institute, Banaras Hindu University.

In a written reply in the Rajya Sabha, Minister of State for Human Resource Development M A A Fatmi said these autonomous schools try to increase their intake of students.

But there is no proposal currently to upgrade or expand any of Regional Engineering Colleges-- now called National Institutes of Technology-- to IIT Level, Mr Fatmi said.

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