NEW DELHI: A senior IIT professor has lambasted the IIT leadership for sticking with a smaller pool of students, who were earlier declared as "qualified", saying that it was a blunder and it would not have been sufficient to fill about 12,000 seats on offer.
Dheeraj Sanghi, a teacher of Computer Science at IIT, Kanpur, in a blog published on Friday, has also pointed out the admission process to the IITs needs to be amended according to changing times.
IIT, Kanpur the organising institute had declared 18,138 students as qualified in JEE-Advanced against 11,279 on offer on June 10 but on being nudged by the Union Human Resources Development ministry, the over-all cut-off was lowered to include around 31000 students. The HRD ministry had given directions for an extended list on Thursday amid concerns that a pool of just 18,000 students was not enough to fill the seats across categories.
"The Joint Admission Board which consists of all Directors and all JEE Chairpersons decided that they will announce the results by sticking to the eligibility conditions that had been announced long ago," Sanghi has written. "In public statements, they said that the number of successful candidates was 1.6 times the number of seats, and they were confident that all seats will be filled by these eligible students. This only means that none of the leadership in our greatest institutes had done their homework."
He further wrote: "Let us look at the claim of 1.6 times, for example. They said that there are 11279 seats and 18138 eligible candidates. This was patently false, since there are about 800 extra seats to accommodate women reservation as well." And therefore, the ratio of eligible candidates to seats is only 1.5 and not 1.6, the professor has pointed out. That JEE Chairperson keeps repeating 1.6 as mantra only shows his ignorance and perhaps a secret desire to not have 14 per cent reservation for women, Sanghi accused.
If IIT directors and those in-charge of the admission process, said Sanghi, only had looked at numbers category wise, they would have noticed that this time the number of eligible candidates in OBC category were actually less than the number of seats reserved for them.
"On the other hand, for SC category the number was 2.3 times the number of seats. How could this be missed by everyone in JAB? It shows how completely unprepared they come for the meetings where such important decisions are to be taken. That says a lot about the leadership of our IITs."
The senior professor also added that it was a sad development that the ministry had to intervene for expansion of the merit list. "The ministry intervention is nothing but an interference with IIT autonomy, but if the entire leadership of all 23 IITs combined will act stupidly, the political leadership is not going to remain silent," he wrote. "I wish IIT leadership does not give occasions for political leadership to intervene".