Parrikar cautions against sudden increase in IIT admissions

Panaji, July 30 (IANS) Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar on Saturday cautioned against allowing a sudden swell in the number of IIT admissions, insisting that the quality of education must not be sacrificed at the altar of quantity at India's premier technology learning institute.

An alumnus of the Indian Institute of Technology-Mumbai, he was responding to an earlier statement made by Union Human Resource Development minister Prakash Javadekar, who had said that, in a first, nearly 10,000 students had been admitted into the various Indian Institutes of Technology in the latest round of entrance examinations.

"As a student of IIT and not a cabinet minister, I would like to say I think 10,000 is a pretty large number. Quality gets sacrificed and the parameters or the colours of quality also slowly fades away as you increase the quantity," Parrikar said, at the inauguration ceremony of a new chapter of the Indian Institute of Technology in Goa.

"I am saying this because (from) 10,000 you can make it 20,000, but it has to be in a very systematic (manner). It cannot be a geographic progression, it has to be arithmetic progression," he said.