New Delhi, July 7: A total of 136 BTech seats at the National Institutes of Technology have found no takers this admission season, prompting the institutes to ask the government to amend the rules and open up state-quota seats for outstation students.

These 136 seats, vacant after the second round of seat allotments yesterday, include 79 reserved for the Scheduled Tribes. (See chart)

Sunil Sarangi, former director of NIT Rourkela, put the operational cost for a BTech seat at an NIT at Rs 3 lakh a year. If these 136 seats stay vacant, they will represent the waste of Rs 16 crore over the four-year duration of the course, he said.

Half of all the seats at each NIT now come under a "home state quota" and are filled according to the reservation policy of the state where the institute is located.

The remaining half come under the national quota and are filled in keeping with the national reservation policy: 15 per cent for the Scheduled Castes, 7.5 per cent for the Scheduled Tribes and 27 per cent for the Other Backward Classes.

All the 136 vacant seats come under the home state quota, reflecting the lack of enough deserving students in these states under the categories concerned, NIT Patna director Ashok De told The Telegraph.

De said a proposal had been sent to the Union human resource development ministry to amend the admission policy so that vacant home-state seats can be opened up for students from other states without changing the reservation category.

"If our proposal is accepted, all the seats can be filled without diluting the caste quotas," De, who chairs the Central Seat Allocation Board for the NITs, said.

"For example, the vacant Scheduled Tribe seats for Nagaland students at NIT Nagaland can be opened up for tribal students from other states."

All the 10,572 seats at the 22 IITs and the Indian School of Mines, Dhanbad, have been allotted, K.V. Krishna, JEE Advanced chairman, said. So, there are no vacancies in the IITs as of now.

However, students will be given the option to surrender their allotted seats from tomorrow if they want to quit and take up a preferred course elsewhere. Several hundred seats are likely to be surrendered over the next one week.

These would then be allotted in the final round of seat allotments in the third week of July, Krishna said.

Despite so many rounds of allotments, a few hundred seats remain vacant every year in the NITs. De said the figure was 192 seats last year.

Sarangi said the NITs had earlier proposed to the government, as a long-term solution, that they be allowed to admit a few additional students above the sanctioned strength to take care of last-minute dropouts.

"Going by the vacancy trend in previous years, we had said the NITs should be allowed to admit about five additional students in those streams," Sarangi said.

"It would address the dropouts. In case there is no dropout in a particular year, a handful of extra students can be accommodated without diluting quality."

No decision has been taken on that proposal.

After the first allotment on June 30, there were 6,475 vacant seats in the NITs.