Hello,

It won't be a good option to drop a year. You can apply for NIT campus if your general rank is below 2 lakh. You can also apply for reputed university or private institutions who accepts jee mains for admission.

You can apply for college options located in your domicile state with home state quota.

The main objective is to get a better college option with best placement record.  You can get it even it is not NIT.

If you want to go for IIT then it would be better to appear jee advance if you are eligible for it by satisfying the cutoff.

For precise list of college options, please use the colleg predictor:-

https://engineering.careers360.com/jee-main-college-predictor?icn=QnA&ici=qna_answer

Hope it helps