The Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering (GATE 2021), which is being organised by the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT B) has observed a fair number of applications for newly introduced two subjects Environmental Science and Engineering (ES) and Humanities and Social Sciences (XH) as compared to some of the existing courses.
ES (Environmental Science and Engineering) and XH (Humanities and Social Sciences) are two new subjects that have been added to the list. This addition makes up to a total of 27 subjects in GATE 2021.
Deepankar Choudhury, Professor of Civil Engineering at IIT Bombay and GATE 2021 organising chairman, confirmed GATE 2021 has received a total of 14,804 and 14,196 applications for Environmental Science and Humanities, respectively. This number is comparatively more than the existing nine subjects including Biomedical Engineering, Statistics and Textile and Fibre Engineering.
There has been a slight increase in the number of registrations as compared to the previous year. More than 8 lakh applications have been submitted for the GATE 2021 exam.
Chaudhary informs, "The institute has got 8.83 lakh applications for GATE 2021 as compared to 8.77 lakh registrations for the GATE 2020."
Registration for the exam was closed on October 14. The GATE 2021 exams are scheduled from February 5-7 and February 12-14, 2021.
Subject-wise registration
Biomedical Engineering (BM) which was introduced last year, is among the three subjects that received low applications.
Apart from Biomedical Engineering, the other two subjects which received the lowest enrollment are Textile Engineering and Fibre Science (TF), Statistics (ST).
"A total of 1990 and 2026 applications have been received for Statistics and Textile Engineering and Fibre, respectively. For BM, only 2292 candidates have registered. Few institutes in India offer Biomedical Engineering at the undergraduate level, which could be the reason for limited takers for this subject in GATE,” says Chaudhary.
He adds, “Besides, Ecology and Evolution, Production and Industrial Engineering, Agricultural Engineering, Petroleum Engineering, Metallurgical Engineering, Aerospace Engineering are six subjects which have got the lowest registration counts as compared to new entrants Humanities and Environmental Science and Engineering."
Increase in Female applicants
This year, female registrations for the GATE have also increased by 10,000 to 2.9 lakh. “Addition of Humanities might be attributed to an increase in female candidates. Close to 60% of applicants in Humanities are represented by female aspirants,” he says.
The Humanities category has received a total number of 8600 female applications.
Zone-wise registration
The ongoing pandemic has brought some real change in the demographic representation of the candidates in the exam as some of the candidates have returned to their native places due to the closing of educational institutions and the new work from the home structure for some of the working professionals.
“The location of the candidates got re-adjusted which led to an increase in the number of applications in Guwahati, Kanpur and Kharagpur regions," he added.
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For GATE 2020, 52,553 candidates applied in IIT Guwahati region while Kharagpur and Kanpur had 1,14,794 and 73,618 registrations, respectively in 2020.
The number of zonal registrations figures
- IIT Bombay - 1.76 lakh
- IIT Kharagpur - 1.3 lakh
- IIT Madras - 1.28 lakh
- IISc Bangalore - 1.2 lakh
- IIT Delhi - 1.13 lakh
- IIT Kanpur - 87,025
- IIT Guwahati - 68,480
- IIT Roorkee - 59,905