Bengaluru: In a major relief to students studying in the vernacular medium, engineering aspirants of Karnataka can now write Joint Entrance Exam (JEE), for admissions to various undergraduate engineering and architecture courses in IITs, NITs and centrally-funded technical institutes (CFTIs), in Kannada from January 2021.

All these years, students were given the option to write the national-level competitive JEE Mains in English, Hindi and Gujarati. But, now the students can appear for JEE mains entrance test in Kannada.

 

Following a long-pending demand from various states including Karnataka to conduct this test in vernacular languages, the Centre has advised NTA to conduct the tests in 11 regional languages,

The Union Ministry of Human Resources has directed the National Testing Agency (NTA), which is also the nodal agency to conduct NEET, CMAT, GPAT, UGC-NET, and other national level competitive exams to set the question paper in Kannada.

Now, the JEE Mains in 2021 will be conducted in regional languages such as Assamese, Bengali, English, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Marathi, Odiya, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu. However, JEE Main 2020 Exam will be conducted as per the earlier schedule from Jan  6 to 11 only in English, Hindi and Gujarati, sources said. JEE Main is a qualifying exam for admissions to 11,279 seats in 23 IITs. NTA is conducting JEE Main since 2019. Earlier, the JEE Main exam was conducted by the CBSE until 2018.

Students have widely welcomed the inclusion of Kannada language for writing the JEE Mains.