New Delhi, July 28: The Centre has relaxed the eligibility criteria for northeastern students and opened up vacant domicile seats in every National Institute of Technology to try and fill up the 3,000-odd BTech seats lying vacant at these premier engineering colleges.

A general category student needs to score 75 per cent in his Class XII board exams, and a Scheduled Caste or Scheduled Tribe student needs 65 per cent, to be eligible for admission to these institutes.

These cut-offs have been lowered to 45 and 40 per cent, respectively, for students from the Northeast for admission to the home state quota seats at the NITs in their region, where the vacancies are highest. (Half the seats in every NIT are set aside for home state candidates.)

But even after this relaxation, many seats in the Northeast are likely to remain vacant - just like many seats in the NITs outside the region too are. To help fill these up, all the home state seats everywhere will be treated as all-India seats, with no domicile restrictions.

The seats reserved for the socially disadvantaged sections will not be diluted, though.

New registration and counselling timetables have been announced to facilitate the latest round of admissions. ( See chart)

All the relaxations are only for this year, the government has clarified.

Till last year, the eligibility norms for NIT admission had been 45 per cent and 40 per cent in the board exams, respectively, for the general and SC/ST categories. This year, they were raised to 75 per cent and 65 per cent.

Students who meet the norm are allotted seats on basis of their rank in the Joint Entrance Examination Main. But the revised eligibility norms have disqualified many students from the Northeast who had made it to the JEE Main merit list, leaving many domicile seats vacant in a region from where the number of candidates is already low.

Of the about 3,200 seats vacant in all, the highest number for a single institute is 300 seats, at NIT Agartala. It's followed by NIT Srinagar (260), NIT Jalandhar and NIT Mizoram (200 each), and NIT Surat (160). NIT Durgapur in Bengal has 110 vacant seats, including 68 for the home state students. These 68 will now become all-India seats.

NIT Tiruchirappalli, ranked 11th among the country's best engineering schools by the human resource development ministry earlier this year, has 32 vacant seats. NIT Rourkela, which ranked 12th, has 130 vacant seats while NIT Goa has just 17.

Seats are vacant even in some of the popular braches of engineering, such as civil engineering at NIT Agartala and electrical engineering at NIT Delhi.

At NIT Srinagar, which witnessed campus violence after some students celebrated India's defeat against the West Indies in the ICC World T20 in April last year, 200 among the 260 vacant seats are in the outstation category.

Former NIT Rourkela director Sunil Sarangi said the dual norm relaxations may help address the vacancies this year but offered no long-term solution. "This is just symptomatic remedy," he said.

He said the northeastern NITs face huge vacancies every year, and their state governments need to provide remedial coaching apart from creating awareness.

Sarangi said the government should allow the NITs to admit a few additional students to some of the courses from which students tend to drop out. If no one drops out, the five to ten per cent extra students can surely be accommodated, he said.

Some 121 BTech seats are vacant this year in the IITs too. The IIT-Indian School of Mines in Dhanbad has three civil engineering seats vacant.