New Delhi, Feb. 27: The Indian Institutes of Technology's first ever entrance test at overseas locations, aimed at picking foreign research students, has proved a damp squib.

Only 254 candidates took the Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering (GATE) conducted by the IITs and IISc Bangalore early this month across six foreign cities: Addis Ababa, Colombo, Dhaka, Dubai, Kathmandu and Singapore.

Only two students took the test in Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital, IIT sources said. In India this month, some 9.23 lakh candidates appeared in the test, which determines MTech and PhD admissions.

In May, the IITs will hold the Joint Entrance Examination Advanced in these six foreign cities - again for the first time - to select overseas students for their BTech courses.

The JEE Advanced is a second-round test the IITs conduct for the 2.2 lakh top scorers of JEE Main. The Central Board of Secondary Education conducts the JEE Main for BTech admissions to the National Institutes of Technology and some other engineering colleges.

However, the foreign candidates seeking IIT admission from the overseas centres can directly register for the JEE Advanced, the institutes have decided.

Up to 1,000 extra seats - 10 per cent of the tech schools' combined current capacity of about 10,000 - can be created for the foreign students.

The decision to organise GATE in these foreign locations was announced last October. An IIT Delhi teacher suggested the test drew so few examinees probably because the foreign students didn't feel confident enough to sit the exam at such short notice, given the poor standard of engineering education in some of these countries.

IIT Bombay director Devang Khakhar said that since this was the first year the test was being held overseas, many foreign students might not have known about it.

"These things take time. We need more publicity. It will take two to three years before the numbers go up," Khakhar said.

Among India's universities, Pune University attracts the highest number of foreign students.

Of the 8,000-odd students at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, nearly 300 are from overseas, said Heeraman Tiwari, the international students' adviser at the university.

JNU conducts entrance tests in Dhaka and Kathmandu; it also grants direct admission to some foreign students based on their academic record.

"We get international students largely in the humanities and the social sciences. Maybe there aren't enough takers for the IITs' (engineering) courses," Tiwari said.

An international student would need to pay a far higher fee at an IIT - Rs 6 lakh a year - compared with JNU, which charges $500 (Rs 33,360) per six-month semester.