ISM lands in fellowship admission controversy

Times of India: Ranchi: Monday, 07 September 2015.

Indian School of Mines in Dhanbad has again found itself embroiled in controversy, this time for alleged irregularities in admission to the Junior Research Fellowship programme.

The institute, which had earlier created controversies over admission to MBA and PhD courses, selected 59 candidates without the minimum qualifying marks for interview and admitted 18 of them for the programme, information provided by ISM to an RTI request stated. These 59 candidates are among the 210 selected for the interview.

"One candidate got 100 in English and only 8.6 in the interview. Another candidate said she secured just 21 marks in written test but scored 82 in interview.

How and why such candidates got selected is a matter of high level enquiry," said Mukesh Kumar, who had filed the RTI query, pointing at the inconsistency in marking system. According to the RTI reply sent to Kumar of Barkakana (Ramgarh), the minimum qualifying marks for general candidates was fixed at 40 out of 100 and 36 for OBC and 12 for SC/ST/physically handicapped candidates for all the disciplines. The list of candidates (copy available with TOI) selected for the interview and finally selected for admission provided by the institute under the RTI application along with marks obtained by them clearly show that general category candidates securing as less as 20, 23, 25, 26, 27, 39, 31, 33 and 35 have also been selected for interview.

The institute, which is vying for IIT status, said the 210 candidates were selected for the interview which included those NET/GATE qualified candidates who were exempted from the written test and candidates selected on the basis of written test.

Similar anomalies were found in cases of SC/ST and OBC categories. Surprisingly, ISM registrar Col M K Singh is not ready to believe the RTI reply provided by the institute.

When contacted, the registrar refuted the allegations in the selection process and claimed that candidates being shown to have secured less marks than the qualifying marks are actually candidates who did not appear for the written test as they were exempted from written test due to their NET/GATE qualification.

"The questions asked in the test are fully objective type questions and there is no human interference in evaluating the computerized answer sheets," he added.