Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras has become the first IIT in the country to introduce admissions for sportspersons in its undergraduate (UG) programmes.

The institute will be introducing the Sports Excellence Admission (SEA) from the academic year 2024-2025, under which, it will offer two supernumerary seats, of which one will be exclusively for female students, in each of its undergraduate programmes for Indian nationals.

This initiative is to recognise and reward talented students who have excelled in sports. This programme encourages deserving students to pursue higher education while continuing to excel in their sports.

The admission process through SEA will require a student to qualify for the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) (Advanced) but would not be through the Joint Seat Allocation Authority (JoSAA) portal but rather through a separate portal operated by IIT Madras. More details are available on the portal: https://jeeadv.iitm.ac.in/sea/  

Announcing this programme, Prof V Kamakoti, Director, IIT Madras, said, “This is a very progressive step to ensure holistic education as envisaged in the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020. This step is to acknowledge achievements in sports by young children and also, give them an opportunity to further understand their respective sports from an engineering and technology perspective. IIT Madras has added many sports-related electives and is also having many state-of-the-art facilities.”