Awareness of PwD Friendly Infra: Why Students with Disabilities Stay Away from IITs, NITs

Although the number of students with disabilities participating in the counseling process for admission to technical colleges has increased by 25 percent this year, it still falls short of the number of seats reserved for PwD candidates.

In top schools, especially Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), there is usually a fight between a handful of students for every seat. However, the places reserved for PwD students become available almost every year. Also this year, no less than 12 places reserved for PwD students were converted to respective category candidates. This means that PwD SC and PwD ST seats were open to SC and ST students as there were not enough students with disabilities who would occupy these seats.

The guidance process for admission to technical colleges (including IITs, National Institutes of Technology, Indian Institutes of Information Technology and other centrally funded institutes) registered 1,489 PwD candidates in 2021, increasing to 1,861 in 2022. However, it still remained less than the places reserved for PwD in colleges – 2,708.

In IITs, a total of 842 PwD candidates were eligible, of which 824 students were allocated seats and the remainder were reassigned to non-PwD candidates, said Mukesh Gupta, chair of the local organizing committee, CSAB-2022.

prof. K. Umamaheshwar Rao, Chairman of the Central Seat Allocation Board (CSAB) and director of NIT Rourkela told News18: “The number of PwD candidates applying to engineering colleges is lower than the allocated seats. This happens every year. There are many concessions including leisure time, writer availability, reserved seats and lower limits for PmD children in JEE Main and Advanced as well as during counseling rounds, but many children are not aware of this. We conducted extensive counseling sessions this year, resulting in an increase in the number of PwD candidates and children from rural and other underserved communities who applied for JEE exams and associated counseling rounds.

The Advisory Board held counseling and awareness sessions, offered special advisory rounds, a compelling PDF for PwD candidates, a bilingual information brochure, and multilingual help centers. The CSAB team also sent text messages and emails to all JEE Main qualified candidates to inform them about the counseling process. These efforts, they claim, have resulted in better student participation from low-income and socially disadvantaged communities.

The academics also emphasized that fewer children from the PwD category in the counseling process is also a result of the low participation of students with disabilities in JEE Main.

“The change has to start at school. Many children with disabilities do not choose the science stream and not many receive the coaching necessary to pass entrance exams,” Rao said.

18-year-old Ojas Maheshwari, who took first place in JEE Main 2022 in the PwD category with a 99.994 percentile score, admitted to News18 that he had problems with online classes because he couldn’t lip read due to masks. He resorts to lip-reading as he has a 62 percent hearing loss. Regular coaching centers have no otherwise skilled friendly infrastructure.

Mukesh Gupta said that he found out during counseling sessions that many parents do not send their students to technical colleges because they do not have the support infrastructure to meet their child’s needs. A destination close to home, despite a low rank, is therefore preferred by many.

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