HYDERABAD : AP students have been dominating the admissions in BITS-Pilani for the last several years and now the same trend is being seen in Hyderabad also.
About 65 per cent of the engineering seats in the Hyderabad campus of the prestigious BITS-Pilani were bagged by students from Andhra Pradesh since setting up campus here in 2008-09.
This year, another 1.20 lakh students applied for BITSAT entrance exam across the country for admission in the Pilani, Goa and Hyderabad campuses.Of them, about 50,000 students were from AP alone.
The online exam is conducted in phases during May andJune every year.
The BITS-Hyderabad campus which offered just 550 seats at graduate level in 2008-09 has now increased its intake to 660 seats apart from 75 seats at PG level and 30 seats at Ph.D level.
“AP students have been dominating the admissions in BITS-Pilani campus by bagging majority of the seats for the last several years. The same trend is being seen in the Hyderabad campus too .
“In the very first year, out of total 530 seats, about 350 were bagged by AP students. Of them, about 200 were from Hyderabad alone.
As of now, 64 per cent of our total students enrolled are from AP,” said Dr V.S. Rao, director, BITS-Pilani, Hyderabad campus.
BITS-Hyderabad spread over 200 acres in Jawahar Nagar on the city outskirts,
has set a target of increasing its overall strength in the campus from the present 2,500 to 3,500 by 2015. It has already spent `205 crore to develop a fully-residential campus and has lined up investments of `60 crore for further developments in the next two years on the campus.
Mr Rao said that the Hyderabad campus presently had 120 faculty members.
“While 20 per cent of the faculty came from the Pilani campus, 50 per cent is from abroad. We are maintaining a teacher-student ratio of 1:16 now. Our target is to achieve 1:12 ratio soon,” Mr Rao informed.
However, the tuition fee has been hiked from `60,000 per annum to `l lakh for B.Tech students during the last three years.
“The fee hike would be in the range of 20 to 25 per cent annually. A student would incur an expenditure of around `8 lakh to complete the course which includes hostel, mess facilities and other charges. However, we are providing scholarships to merit students. Around 80 per cent of our student avail fee waiver scheme apart from providing bank loans to all the students,” Mr Rao said.