India, Nov. 29 -- The Supernumerary Seats Scheme (SSS), introduced in 2018 to increase the share of women in undergraduate engineering programmes by creating 20% additional seats exclusively for female students, has been "remarkably successful" in rapidly boosting enrolment, albeit with some regional variation, said a recent study published in the journal Higher Education (Springer).

The study by Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) Delhi faculty members Nandana Sengupta and Ravinder Kaur, and University of Houston PhD scholar Rohit Munshi, titled 'A foot in the door: evaluating the supernumerary seats scheme for girls in the IITs', is the data-driven "first rigorous evaluation" of the scheme.

Published on November 1, the study found t...