According to Preeti Aghalyam, the first woman to become an IIT director, women are still a minority at Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), and despite continual efforts to increase the gender ratio on campuses, there is still a long way to go. While the first IIT was established in Kharagpur in 1951, it is only after seven decades that a woman has been nominated as the institute’s president.
But for Aghalayam, the director-in-charge of Zanzibar’s new IIT, it’s not just about breaking a glass ceiling, but also about the “Once an IITian, Always an IITian” theory. IIT-Madras, founded in 1959, is the country’s first IIT to open a foreign campus, with the new institute in Tanzania’s Zanzibar expected to open for the first academic session in October.
Engineering colleges in India have gone a long way since the 1990s, when the gender ratio was 10:1. This ratio fell to 7:1 in the early 2000s and then to 4:1 in the mid and late 2000s. It deteriorated further in 2014, when most IITs had between 5% and 12% of their student body made up of females. In India, IITs admitted 995 girls and 9,883 boys a year before the supernumerary quota for females was implemented in 2018.
As many as 3310 girls, or 20% of the total number of seats, have confirmed admissions across the 23 IITs during the admissions for the 2022-23 academic session. Admission for the 2023-24 academic year is still open.
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