Will JEE fill up more seats this year

Last month, I had written about a judgement of Andhra Pradesh High Court which directed JEE to do something to fill up more seats this year. The blog article is here. Last year, 443 seats remained vacant because there were not sufficient number of qualified candidates available to fill them up (1 OBC, 7 SC, 232 ST, and 203 PD - Physically challenged). There were an additional 781 seats that went vacant because selected students did not join (501 General, 109 OBC, 100 SC, 44 ST, and 27 PD). So the total number of vacant seats were 1224. The court was not perturbed by 443 seats. It did not want IITs to lower their standard (and in any case, most of these would result in the corresponding seat in the preparatory course). But the court was seriously perturbed by the 781 seats which went vacant due to students not joining after paying the initial fee.

In the beginning of June 2011, there was a meeting of Directors of all IITs to discuss the court order. They decided to have a 3rd round of seat allocation. Last year, there were only two rounds of seat allocation.

I have a problem with this. If you read the court order, it mildly suggests that perhaps another round of seat allocation will help. In that sense, the Directors have followed the court order and the matter is over. But the court order says much more than obliquely suggesting the third round. Read this:


"It baffles me to note that academicians and administrators of the premier institutions like IITs cannot find a much better process of admission than stopping with the second round of counseling, come what may be the vacancy position in the institutions. It is time that the scholarly inputs are borrowed and implemented at the earliest so that a national waste will not get repeated. I hope and trust that the remedial measures are put in place before the next academic year’s counseling is undertaken."


It is clear that the court is concerned about the vacant seats and wants JEE to do whatever is feasible to reduce the number of vacancies, and some oblique references to 3rd round were just a suggestion, and not the order of the court.

It is clear to me and must have been clear to Directors (and Chairpersons of JEE at different IITs) that a third round of seat allocation will not result in any significant drop in the number of vacant seats. (If you read my previous article on this, I had said even before the meeting of the Directors that the third round will not be effective unless it is conducted after the beginning of the semester. So it is not something that I am saying now with better information on this year's process.)

My contention is that by doing the 3rd round of seat allocation, and taking no other step for reducing the vacancies, JEE is not following the spirit of the court order, as the 3rd round could not possibly solve the problem which the court has ordered it to solve. If there was too little time to come up with the solution for this year, JEE should have gone back to the court and requested for time till next year. Or it should have challenged the court decision. By doing neither, it has accepted the court decision, but still not implemented it in spirit.