BIT-Sindri students upbeat about their placement on campus on Friday. Picture by Gautam Dey

Slow, but steady, Jharkhand’s lone state-run engineering college, BIT-Sindri is holding fort despite the ripples of recession.

So far, 189 out of 707 final-year students of different streams have bagged jobs with visiting companies in the ongoing placement season of BIT-Sindri.

First-time entrant Electrosteel Castings Limited, headquartered in Calcutta, picked up eight BTech students during its placement interview on Thursday, offering a package of Rs 3.6 lakh per annum.

The eight included Rajiv Kumar Singh, Annu Shekhar Narang and Nikhil Grover of metallurgical engineering; Siddharth Shankar Paul and Nehal Singh of mechanical engineering; Sumit Kumar and Vivek Kashyap of electrical engineering and Akshay Kumar of production engineering.

All will be posted at the company’s Bokaro plant.

Assistant professor and training and placement cell in-charge S.C. Dutta said the selection process started in Wednesday and continued till Thursday late night.

“Around 100 students from across streams appeared for the written test in which 42 qualified for group discussion. Finally, out of the 42, eight were chosen,” he said.

Dutta hoped the placement figure would soon cross 200.

“Some companies of the Tata group are likely to come next week,” Dutta said. “Results of Daimler India and 197 dot com, who visited our college earlier, are also awaited.”

Software giant IBM picked up 60 students, the highest number this year, offering Rs 3.2 lakh per annum to each. Another software biggie, Indian MNC Tata Consultancy Services picked up 51 students, giving each a Rs 3.18 lakh package.

Tata Steel picked up two mechanical engineering students but offered the highest package so far of Rs 8.2 lakh per annum each.

Besides these, other companies that came for head-hunting include Larsen and Toubro, Vedanta, Vastu Vihar, Godrej, Visa Steel, Usha Martin and Jindal.

Of the 12 companies that came to the tech campus in Sindri so far, Electrosteel Castings Limited and 197 dot com made their debuts here.

Giving placement trends, Dutta said of the 189 selected students, 38 were from civil, 27 from electronics and communication, 26 from mechanical, 22 from information technology 20 from computer science 19 from electrical, 12 from metallurgical, nine from mining and eight each from chemical and production engineering streams.

BIT director S.K. Singh said that they were now planning to write to Coal India Limited (CIL) and other PSUs of the state government.

“Considering recession gripping the economy, the placement figure is satisfactory. We are leaving no stone unturned and are approaching various companies, including Jharkhand-based private companies and PSUs to conduct placement interviews on campus,” Dutta said.