Indian
Express: New Delhi: Sunday, October 28, 2018.
As
many as 858 BTech seats across 23 IITs could have gone vacant this year had the
premier institutes not released an extended merit list for admission,
information obtained by The Sunday Express under the Right to Information Act
has shown.
On
June 14, IIT-Kanpur the organising institute for JEE-Advanced this year diluted
the aggregate cut-off score by ten percentage points to expand the pool of
qualified candidates. The extended merit list had 13,850 students (8,961
general, 771 SC, 293 ST and 3,825 OBC) in addition to the list released on June
10 that had 18,138. In response to an RTI application, IIT-Kanpur said that of
the 13,850 candidates in the extended merit list, 858 secured admission in
different undergraduate programmes across 23 IITs.
This
was the first time that cut-off marks were revised after results were declared.
The unprecedented decision was taken after directions by the Centre in the wake
of concerns that the first merit list did not have enough candidates to fill
all 11, 279 seats.
The
Indian Express, on June 11, had reported that when the IIT-JEE was renamed
JEE-Advanced and the eligibility criteria for the entrance test tweaked, the
number of candidates who qualified had always been at least twice the number of
seats on offer. But, the 18,138 students (in the list announced on June 10)
were only 1.6 times the total seats, making it the smallest number of qualified
candidates since 2012.
Of
the 858 students who secured admission after the extended list, 156 were from
the general category, 34 from the Scheduled Tribe (ST) category and 658 from
Other Backward Classes (OBC).
According
to a member of the Joint Admission Board of the IITs, who requested anonymity,
at least 200 seats and as many as 858 could have been left unoccupied had the
IITs not revised the aggregate cut-off score. This would have probably been the
highest number of vacant IIT seats ever.
“The
court permits us to convert unfilled OBC seats to general category. If the IITs
were to admit students only through the first list, then the 658 OBC seats,
which were otherwise taken up by OBC candidates in the extended list, would
have been converted to general,” said the Joint Admission Board member.
“Obviously,
some of the converted seats in popular programmes would have found takers among
general candidates in the first list. However, even after that, the number of
vacancies would have been large. It will be safe to assume that at least 200
seats (filled by 156 general and 34 ST candidates in the extended list) and at
most 858 seats would have fallen vacant.”
This
year, after seven rounds of counselling, roughly 120 seats were unoccupied with
the most in IIT-BHU (41) followed by IIT-Dhanbad (24) and IIT-Jodhpur (15).
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