Mumbai: Over the years, the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) have been quietly reshaping courses. Five-year integrated programmes, once seen as a pragmatic option for those who could not make the cut for a BTech course but were keen on imbibing the rigour of an IIT through an accelerated masters course, are steadily being phased out. Increasingly, even as the five-year courses are being stopped, the doorway to a masters opens not at the start but midway after the fifth semester now.At some campuses, the intake in the 5-year courses is being folded into the expanding sprawl of the BTech programme. Student numbers are surging, partly as a result of widening reservation norms. At other institutes, administrators say, the programme is being repackaged in “a new avatar” to make them interdisciplinary. Unlike a traditional five-year course — where a student deepens their roots within a single discipline — this is a dual degree that is more layered. It allows a student to walk between two worlds: a Bachelor’s in one field, and a Master’s in another. Mechanical engineering and robotics. Physics and data science.The need for this revamp was felt because BTech students, armed with internships and industry exposure by year three, were walking into job interviews, while their five-year counterparts were not drawing recruiters. “The interest among top-ranking students was steadily waning,” said Amit Aahuja, Career Counselling Expert at Allen Career Institute. “This reform reflects that drift — and the system needed to evolve.”But there is a deeper re-wiring at play. “A degree in one stream was no longer enough,” said IIT Madras Director, Professor V Kamakoti. “To build the systems of tomorrow,” engineers were required to learn to think beyond their silos, he added. The future, he said, belongs to cross-pollinators — those who are firmly grounded in one stream, yet fluent in another. “A mechanical engineer who speaks the language of robotics. A chemistry graduate decoding the complexities of quantum computing.” Thus, the five-year engineering programme is being reimagined as a multi-disciplinary dual degree. This, he said, “is the new avatar.” It’s not about abandoning depth; it’s about expanding one’s roots so they can draw from multiple soils.At IIT-Delhi, there are many students who have chosen the longer road. “Several dual-degree programmes continue to thrive,” said IIT-Delhi Director, Professor Rangan Banerjee. Additionally, after the third year, those with a spark for discovery are given the choice to convert their BTech into an MTech. “The ones who opt in,” he added, “are truly driven by a passion for research.”However, at IIT-Bombay, the 5-year course is being abandoned. Professor Deepankar Choudhury from the civil engineering department said the IIT-B dual degree was marked by a strange dissonance. “By the fourth year, students found themselves watching their BTech batchmates prepare to graduate, take jobs, and step into the world — while they had another year to go,” he said. To most students, the fifth year began to feel like a burden. Many sought an early exit, petitioning to convert their dual degree into a plain BTech. Over time, the pattern hardened into policy.
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