Ahmedabad/Mumbai: Indian Institute of Technology has brought out comparison regarding the placements offered this year to the 2007 levels as there has been an increase of about 15-20 percent in the salaries being offered on campus recruitment. The final placement process has welcomed the long queue of the recruiting companies after a two year break; report Vinay Umarji and Kalpana Pathak. "Already over 140 firms have confirmed their participation in the final placement process at the campus. We expect salaries to rise by 15-20 per cent this year, given the buoyancy in the market," said a training and placement member at IIT Kharagpur. Information Technology(IT) and IT enabled services(ITeS) lead the pack during the placements followed by manufacturing, automobile, finance, banking, consulting and aeronautics to name a few. Saurabh Basu, a faculty in charge at IIT Guwahati opines that while firms from the IT and ITeS sector have been overwhelming in number, almost over 50 per cent, automobile sector has also been quite demanding this year particularly. With a successful PPO season behind, the final placement scenario is definitely going to improve as compared to last year. Already out of the 15-odd PPOs that have been received, the highest salary is reported to be at Rs 12 lakh as against Rs 9 lakh last year. While discussing different IITs, it's important to consider the fact that on one hand when IIT Guwahati already has over 100 firms ready to participate in the final placement process, on the other hand a batch of 850 will be taking part in the placement process at IIT Kanpur. Firms like Boeing and HAL have confirmed their participation to represent their aeronautics sector. IIT Roorkee has recorded the highest number of pre-placement offers where the number has reached 52. The institute says over 100 companies have already confirmed participation and the salary levels are up by 13 per cent so far. The highest offer on campus till date is Rs 18 lakh yearly, against Rs 16 lakh made last year. The inter-IIT sports meet will provide a break to the placement process after Dec 14 which will be resumed once the institutes open in Jan 2011 first week. The global financial turmoil had resulted in reduced placement offers at IITs and other higher educational institutions in the last few years. The regret letters from companies had been huge in number and a few major banking and finance recruiters had not even participated in the placements.