Dhanbad, Sept. 19: Mining engineers are rushing to be a part of the Great IT Dream.

Graduates of the premier Indian School of Mines (ISM) are increasingly opting for the more cushy and lucrative information technology business instead of the core sector that they received training for, prompting fears of a brain drain of a different kind.

Around 124 students of ISM, a deemed university on a par with the Indian institutes of technology, are to pass out in June 2005.

A study of the job list available with the extremely-active placement cell shows that the majority of students who are studying to for a B. Tech degree in mechanical, mining, mineral or mining machinery engineering has chosen a career in information technology.

For example, 10 of the 24 students in the mining engineering discipline have been booked by Infosys and Virtusa Software at an average annual package of Rs 3 lakh.

Only petroleum engineering students have stuck to the core sector with multinationals like Schlumberger booking the to-be graduates at a package as high as Rs 8 lakh per year.

The institute admits that there is an anomaly. ?Students are opting for the service sector rather than serving the core industrial sector for which they receive rigorous training at ISM. The new corporate houses offer a higher pay package and better working conditions, which attract students. Also, the IT companies are not too concerned with the discipline in which a student has graduated. All that they recognise is brains and then they groom the students as per their requirements,? said P.K. Banik, professor-in-charge (training and placement).

What was of concern, he added, was the trend among students to skip interviews being conducted by a core sector company. ?When a core sector company offers campus interviews, very few short-listed candidates turn up as they don?t want to risk selection by a non-attractive firm, because once booked they can?t appear for selection in other placement programmes. The latest trend of booking students while they are in the third year of their B.Tech programmes isn?t particularly good. The early booking makes the students somewhat complacent about their studies and they tend to give priority to the sector they have to serve after passing out. We are witnessing another kind of brain drain which puts the service industry at an advantage at the cost of the core industrial sector,? he said.

But the students are not complaining. Preeti Singh, a final-year mineral engineering students, said working conditions were not as good in the core sector. ?One has to work in remote areas, that too in tough conditions. On the other hand, a software job will give us an airconditioned chamber in a big city. I have opted for Infosys which is offering me a pay package of Rs 14,880 per month, while in mineral engineering, the pay is around Rs 10,000 per month. Infosys will make us undergo a rigorous training of six months,? says a confident Singh.

Established in 1926, Indian School of Mines was named and modelled after Royal School of Mines in London. Though the London institute opted for a different name, Imperial College of Science and Technology, ISM continued with the tag of school to have the spirit of curiosity as good as that in school-going students.