According to the Ministry of Education, the number of students enrolled in 23 IITs has grown from 6,5000 to 1.35 lakh, and the government intends to add 6,500 additional seats.
Sukanta Majumdar, the Minister of State (MoS) for education, informed Parliament in a written response that the total number of students enrolled in the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) has increased by 100 percent in the past ten years. Over the years, the overall enrolment at 23 IITs has increased from 65,000 to 1.35 lakh.
Sukanta Majumdar confirmed that funding for infrastructure expansion at the five IITs founded after 2014 was included in the 2025–2026 Budget. This covers IIT Patna's academic facilities and hostel.
The creation of extra infrastructure at the five IITs established after 2014 has been announced in Budget 2025–2026 in order to support the education of an additional 6,500 students. Additionally, plans to increase IIT Patna's dormitories and other infrastructural capacities were revealed, Sukanta Majumdar said.
He also said that IIT-BHU Varanasi (Uttar Pradesh), IIT Hyderabad (Telangana), IIT Kanpur, IIT Tirupati (Andhra Pradesh), and IIT Patna (Bihar) are now all based on permanent campuses. More than Rs 1,830 crore has been set out for these five IITs' development for the 2024–25 fiscal year.
In the meantime, the Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT Madras) announced that students who perform well in national and international Olympiads can now apply for undergraduate degrees. These Olympiads are competitive tests that evaluate and test students' knowledge of a range of academic disciplines and abilities.
IIT Madras claims that this admission, called "Science Olympiad Excellence" (ScOpE), will occur outside of the JEE (Advanced) system and that applicants will begin to be accepted in the academic year 2025–2026.
As with admissions through the Fine Arts and Culture Excellence and Sports Excellence Admissions methods, ScOpE will have two additional seats each program, one of which will be exclusively for female students. Age and completing Class 12 are prerequisites for eligibility, and they are the same as those for JEE Advanced in that year. The applicant also shouldn't have received an IIT acceptance before.
