NEW DELHI: In an unprecedented development, the Union Human Resources Development ministry has asked the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) to release a supplementary merit list for admission this year.
IIT Kanpur, the organising institute for JEE(Advanced) this year, was asked to release a merit list with an increased number of candidates, which is twice the number of total seats on offer in each discipline and each category --general as well reserved categories, late on Wednesday night.
The institute will have to release the supplementary merit list before choice-filling for joint seat allocation for IITs begin.
“Responding to requests from students and the IIT community to pro-actively ensure that all reservation seats are duly filled, I have directed @IIT Kanpur conducting JEE Advanced to make available candidates, strictly as per merit, twice the number of seats in each category,” HRD Minister Prakash Javadekar tweeted on Thursday morning.
HRD ministry sources pointed out that the number of candidates who qualified for the exam has always been at least twice the number of seats on offer.
This year, however, the 18,138 students on the merit list are only 1.6 times the total seats, making it the smallest number of qualified candidates in last seven years.
“This has raised concerns that seats in reserved categories and for girls could go vacate even though IITs have been insisting that admissions rarely go beyond rank 14,000,” an official dealing with higher education said.