The Indian Institutes of Technology,which have been struggling to fill up the reserved category seats (Scheduled Castes/SCs and Scheduled Tribes/STs),had reasons to cheer after the JEE results were declared on Wednesday. For the second year in a row,seats reserved for SCs will be filled up from the word go. Like last year,there will be no SC preparatory list this year as the number of successful SC candidates is more than the seats reserved. Preparatory list includes those candidates who did not score enough in the JEE to make it to the reserved seats and are given further relaxation on the grades so that they could be put through training and then admitted to IITs to fill the quota. Of the 45,172 SC candidates who appeared for JEE this year,1,966 have qualified for 1,441 reserved seats. From the IIT Bombay zone,around 429 SC candidates have qualified,of which the scores of 404 had to be relaxed, said AV Mahajan,vice-chairman,JEE 2011,IIT Bombay. In 2010,probably for the first time ever,the IITs did not have to bring out a preparatory list as 1,773 SC candidates had qualified for 1,426 seats. All the IITs,IT-BHU and ISMU-Dhanbad conduct a one-year preparatory course for SC/ST and students with physical disabilities who do not make it to the common or the reserved category merit lists. SC/ST candidates along with students with physical disabilities (PD) get 50 per cent relaxation from the last general category candidate when they are not able to make it to the common merit list. A further 50 per cent relaxation is given to those who do not qualify so that they can be sent for the preparatory course. In 2009,a little over 1,000 SC and ST seats had to be converted to the preparatory course. As far as the ST seats are concerned,of the 18,125 candidates who took JEE,766 qualified. According to the figures given by IIT Kanpur,the organising IIT for JEE 2011,the number of ST seats available is 730. However,as per the press note issued by IIT Kanpur,an ST preparatory course list has been declared and 112 have qualified for it. Unconfirmed reports say as the number of qualified candidates declared are 1.4 times than seats available,766 students may not fulfil this criterion and hence the need for a separate preparatory list. From the IIT Bombay zone,281 STs qualified,of which 265 could not make it to common merit list and their scores had to be relaxed. Further,around 2,700 candidates from the other backward classes (OBCs) have qualified this year from among 1,38,104. The number of OBC seats are 2,599. More OBC students have qualified as compared to the number of seats available. However,they will also need to establish their OBC status. From the IIT Bombay zone,around 599 have qualified,of which scores of 224 had to be relaxed by 10 per cent, said Mahajan. Last year,as many as 469 OBC seats could not be filled and had to be transferred to general category.
