Few Gulf NRI students making it to prestigious Indian institute

Though there are 26 Indian schools with CBSE curricula in the UAE and many NRI parents would like to see their children get into the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology, very few students from the Gulf are able to pass the tough IIT entrance examination.

According to Indian education experts, though there are about 5.5 million Indian expatriates in the region and IIT can admit 10 per cent foreign students out of 10,000 seats per year, only six foreign students of the about 120 who appeared for the IIT entrance exam, could qualify last year.

More than 350,000 students from all over India participated in the last IIT entrance exam for 10,000 seats and the number of students from the UAE was nil or negligible, according to experts.

D V Rao, executive director of the Hyderabad-based Sri Chaitanya Group, said it trains several thousand students for IIT entrance examinations, including some students from the Andhra expatriate community in the Gulf, but not one of them could qualify last year.

“Overseas Keralite and Andhra students do not appear for these examinations in large numbers and one possible reason is the lack of training facilities in Gulf countries. We are starting such a facility for Indian students and we hope to see more Indian students from the region make it to the list of successful candidates.”

Sri Chaitanya and the Wisdom Group of the UAE are starting the first training programme for IIT-JEE entrance examinations.

Sri Chaitanya, which runs 131 residential schools, claims to have trained many top rankers in IIT-JEE examinations.

“Another reason for the poor performance of Gulf-based Indian students is the lack of well-qualified faculty members. We won’t be recruiting any teacher from the UAE. To maintain academic standards, we will be transferring some of the faculty from our Indian operations,” he said.

He also said last year Chaitanya accounted for the top ranker in the IIT-JEE examination and all the three top rankers in the All India Engineering Entrance Examination.

India’s Ministry of Human Resource Development has been asked to set up a centre in Dubai on the lines of the seven Indian IITs to encourage NRI students to pursue IIT academic programmes, he added

G R Lakkaraju, vice president, international operations, Sri Chaitanya, said: “We trained 1,064 students for the all-India IIT-JEE examination in 2011 and none of them were foreign students of Indian origin. Hardly any students from the Andhra or Keralite community in the Gulf region passed these tests. This is because there is no formal coaching facility for these exams in the Gulf.”

Sri Chaitanya Educational Institutions is starting its coaching programmes to prepare students for the IIT-JEE exam, the all India engineering entrance and All India medical entrance examinations. Starting from April 2012, the training programmes will be offered to Indian community students in Dubai, Sharjah, Abu Dhabi and Ras Al Khaimah. The institute has tied up with the Wisdom group in the UAE. Similar training programmes are also starting in Oman, Qatar and other Gulf countries.

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