AIEEE COUNSELLING

State governments in the northeast have urged HRD Ministry to relax norms for the students of the region for admission into the National Institutes of Technology (NITs) across the country.Union human resource development ministry, in a letter to all the states June 9, directed that 50 percent of the seats of these NITs would be filled through the state quotas, while the remaining 50 percent would be from the successful candidates of the All India Engineering Entrance Examination (AIEEE).Presently, there are 20 NITs, one each in Andhra Pradesh, Assam, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Gujarat, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, Jharkhand, Karnataka, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Orissa, Punjab, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, Tripura, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal.Under the previous guidelines, 50 percent of the states in each NIT were to be filled by domicile candidates of the state in which the NIT was located and the remaining 50 percent were to be allocated to other states and union territories.In 2003, the union government decided to take over 17 Regional Engineering Colleges (RECs) and upgraded them as NITs.Three more engineering colleges - the Bihar College of Engineering, Patna, the Government Engineering College, Raipur, and the Tripura Engineering College, Agartala, were upgraded to NITs in 2004, 2005 and 2006, respectively.The central government has also decided to set up the country’s 21st NIT in Manipur capital Imphal by converting the Manipur Institute of Technology into NIT,