The Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) across the country are offering fee concessions and relaxation in already lower cut-off to students from reserved categories to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education for all, according to officials.

"In the JEE-based admissions, fee remissions and fee waivers are provided right from the application stage. At the application stage, students belonging to the SC, ST, PwD (persons with disability) need to pay only half the examination fee. Further, cut-offs are relaxed to support a greater number of admissions in the SC, ST, PwD and OBC categories," said IIT Madras Director V Kamakoti.

IIT Madras conducted the Joint Entrance Exam (JEE)-Advanced, the entrance exam for IITs, this year.

"There are 23 IITs currently and as per Ministry of Education's focus on providing support to students from the disadvantaged sections of society, several initiatives have been taken. Besides these, some IITs take additional measures individually as well," he said.

"To further enable a greater number of students to benefit from the high quality of education that the IITs have to offer, SC, ST students who secure marks lower than the relaxed selection cut-off, are given special training through a preparatory course, which enables them to directly join the IITs after completion of the preparatory course," he added.

Starting this year, JEE (Advanced) 2024 team enabled "Citizen Service Centres" across the country to help candidates, specifically from rural places, to fill out the choices and pay the fees through the online portal.

"A multi-lingual call centre was also set up to answer queries from candidates.

A reconciliation day after the fee-payment deadline date was introduced this year to handle cases (who made at least one payment attempt) that had last-minute technical glitches," Kamakoti said.

During the admission process, all eligible candidates pay a seat acceptance fee to ensure seriousness in applying for the seat. The SC, ST and PwD students pay only 50 per cent of the acceptance fee of regular candidates.

Kamakoti said that in the absence of the seat acceptance fees, it was observed in the past that the candidates blocked the seat but did not turn up on when the classes started, leading to many seats lying vacant.

"Since in the seat allocation process, the seats reserved for SC and ST can be allocated only to them, a vacant SC or ST seat results in the denial of a precious IIT seat to another deserving reserved category candidate," he said.

"If a student's parental income is less than Rs 1 lakh, irrespective of which category, the full tuition fee is waived by all the 23 IITs. Further, full tuition waiver is also provided for students from the SC, ST and PwD candidates," he said.

Students from the Economically Weaker Sections (EWS) with parental income between Rs 1 lakh and Rs 5 lakh have two-thirds of their tuition fee waived, he added.

Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by The Telegraph Online staff and has been published from a syndicated feed.