IIT Bombay, Hyderabad, 17 Top NITs Discontinue Branch Change Option for Students

The top Indian Institutes of Technology including IIT Bombay, IIT Hyderabad, and IIT Jammu have decided to discontinue the upgrade option for branches in their institution. In addition to the IITs, 17 National Institutes of Technology (NIT) have also decided that they will follow the IITs and discontinue the upgrade option for branches in their institution. As per the reports suggest, NIT Delhi, Raurkela, Tiruchi, Warangal, Kurukshetra, Jaipur, Surat, Nagaland, Jamshedpur, Pondicherry, Suratkal and Calicut are the NITs that have decided to discontinue the option for students.

Since the students would not be able to upgrade from lower branches to higher branches it has led to admission cutoffs for these lower branches of IIT are surging upwards. The qualifying All India Rank has now been increased by 3 to 4 thousand when compared to the past years.

Earlier, when the IITs allowed branch upgradation for students in lower branches, the cutoff of these lower branches for IIT used to be comparatively much less than that of other branches. The branch change option has been ceased to continue by the IIT Bombay and IIT Hyderabad. With that no longer being an option, most students are applying for lower branches of other top IITs in the country. This has led to an increase in cut-offs of Energy, Chemical, Civil, Metallurgy, Environmental signs, and Environmental branches of IIT Bombay.

Amit Ahuja, a Career Counselling Coach from Allen Institute of Education has recently said in an interview that every year a lot of students apply to get admission to the core branches of IIT. However, he has seen that a lot of students are admitted to lower branches which were opened in the years 2012 to 2017, and then upgrade their branch when they came in the second year. This helped students get into their desired branches just on the basis of their CGPA by the end of the first year. But it won’t be possible now in the main IITs of Bombay, Hyderabad, and Jammu.

Since these institutes have decided to discontinue the upgrade process, students will now be more inclined to choose other IIT institutes like Mandi, Ropar, Indore, Patna, Jodhpur, and Gandhinagar. These institutions will still provide the option to students to upgrade their course after they complete their first year and can choose their dream field as per their CGPA.