The Supreme Court on Friday stepped into the controversy surrounding the IIT admissions by staying an Andhra Pradesh High Court order that reserved four seats for students who had challenged the criteria by which the IITs would consider candidates who secured the top 20 percentile in the Class XII Board examination.
Surprised over the fact that seats of IIT would fall vacant on account of the AP High Court order, the apex bench of Justices KS Radhakrishnan and Pinaki Chandra Ghosh asked, “Is it happening in IITIJ”
Senior advocate V Giri, who represented the Organising Chairman of JEE Exam 2013, said that he feared other High Courts to follow suit and prayed for stay of the HC order.
The apex court advised the lawyer who filed the petition for IIT, advocate Madhusmita Bora, to file a transfer petition after she informed that similar matters were pending before other High Courts as well. “It will unnecessarily lead to inconsistent orders,” the bench remarked.
With just a day to go for IIT to prepare the final admission list, apex court’s order has come as a huge relief. Following the announcement by CBSE on September 25, 2012 about the changed criteria under the joint entrance examination (JEE) for admission into IITs and other centrally funded technical institutions, IITs had published Brochure for admission which required candidates to first appear in JEE Main and successful candidates to later appear for JEE-Advanced.
One condition was introduced for getting into the JEE-Advanced list requiring the candidate to be in the top 20 percentile of successful candidates in Class XII examination conducted by the respective State boards.
Cut-off marks for each Board were published as per the data provided by the State boards. Based on this, a list of 9716 candidates for admission to various IITs was drawn of which 79 candidates were rejected as they failed to have the minimum qualifying marks as per the cut-off fixed for their Board result.
Four among the lot of 79 rejected candidates approached the AP High Court which passed interim orders on July 8. The IIT JEE Organising Committee had pointed out to apex court that due to HC intervention, deserving candidates would be unnecessarily deprived of their rightful seat. The apex court is expected to take up the matter after two weeks.