The number of female students at the Indian Institute of Technology, Gandhinagar has doubled this year. As against a mere 15 female students admitted last year, this year IIT-Gn has admitted 29 students. The result comes following the change in policy made by the IIT council that offered 779 seats exclusively for girls to balance the poor gender ratio across all IITs. As a result, IITs across the country have witnessed a rise in the number of female students. Of the 779 seats, IIT Kharagpur received 113 seats followed by IIT Dhanbad with 95 seats, IIT Kanpur with 79, and so on. "While IIT-Gn had got 13 seats for girls, the institute admitted 29 girls this year," a source said. "Special supernumerary seats have helped improve the number of female students in IITs this year. IIT-Gn had taken special initiatives for reaching out to aspiring female candidates. We had set up a special helpdesk for female applicants to answer their queries. A webpage and a Facebook page were also designed to reach out and help female candidates. Email IDs of the faculty members including female faculty from various departments were also made available on the webpage," said professor Kabeer Jasuja, associate dean, undergraduate studies, IIT-Gn. Dhruvi Lodhavia, a student who secured admission in electrical engineering at IIT-Gn, said, "IIT-Gn was the best option to choose from for my rank and it also offered me my preferred branch. Besides, I had heard of the foundation programme and international internships, which helped me decide accordingly." As per the IIT Council, 14 per cent of the batch should comprise of girls, which for next year will increase to 17 per cent and to 20 per cent in 2020. Over the years, premier educational institutions have changed their selection criteria in order to increase the number of female students. Management institutes are working towards a system to have more non-engineers in their batch. The Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, too, has been witnessing an increase in number of female students. This year's batch at IIM-A has 27 per cent women. Speaking about the same, professor Errol D'Souza said, "We are conscious about the efficacy of increasing the percentage of women entering our class. The achievements are slow as the goal is to not give extra credits or specify a quota for gender or other diversity attributes in the admissions process. In a discussion-based learning environment, such as ours, diversity of participants' backgrounds and inclusivity at an institutional level contribute significantly to a positive learning environment." FEMALE RATIO AT IIT GANDHINAGAR: Year Number of girls 2018 292017 152016 172015 162014 14

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