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The Bombay High Court will hear a PIL challenging the eligibility criteria of 75 per cent and top 20 percentile for the Joint Entrance Exam (JEE) Main 2023 soon
The PIL has been postponed as it was scheduled for today (February 21), and the next hearing date will be announced soon.
According to the Public Interest Litigation, JEE Main aspirants have demanded 75 per cent and the top 20 percentile criteria should be removed for this year’s entrance exam, or lowered to 50 per cent.
As the hearing date comes closer, let’s take a look at what is the JEE Main 2023 eligibility criteria matter:
In the 2023 JEE brochure, the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) brought back the eligibility criteria of 75 per cent marks in Class 12 board exams for admission to NITs, IIITs, and CFTIs.
According to an early JEE Advanced brochure released by IIT Guwahati, candidates should have secured at least 75 per cent in their class 12 board exams with the aggregate marks for SC, ST, and PwD candidates at least 65 per cent, or should be within the category-wise top 20 percentile of successful candidates of their respective boards. However, the top 20 percentile criterion was not provided for the Main exam earlier.
Aspirants have said candidates who failed to secure 75 per cent in the Class 12 exams, especially those for whom this is the last chance to appear for the entrance exams, will be left in the cold.
In January, a Bombay High Court bench headed by acting Chief Justice SV Gangpurwala and Justice Sandeep V Marne heard the PIL on the issue of postponement of the January session of JEE Main 2023 and the 75 per cent eligibility criterion.
The bench had refused to defer the JEE Main exam. “If any orders are passed today directing postponement of January exams, the same may have a cascading effect on future exams also. Extraordinary circumstances do not appear to exist for restraining respondents from holding the January examination. Lakhs of students must have been preparing for exam,” the bench had said, according to Bar and Bench.
It had also added that the eligibility criterion issue will once again be heard in February.
Several aspirants, experts, and even some Members of Parliament (MPs), including Congress leader Karti P Chidambaram, took to Twitter to raise their voices against what they said was an apparent unfair eligibility criterion.
After that, the Union Education Ministry decided to revise the JEE Main 2023 eligibility criteria. The revised guidelines said apart from the All India Rank (AIR) of the candidate in JEE Main, a student should either have scored 75 per cent or above in the Class 12 board exam, or have appeared among the top 20 percentile candidates of the respective board exam result.
JEE Main 2023 aspirants are not satisfied with the revised guideline and have been protesting against it on several social media platforms. They claim the eligibility criteria of the ‘top 20 percentile’ has no uniformity and vary from board to board.
“Several state boards do not usually declare the top 20 percentile, and it can vary from one state board to another, and from CBSE to CISCE too. For example, if Maharashtra Board has 76 per cent as the top 20 percentile, and Bihar has 65 then it gets unfair for Maharashtra board students, CBSE students and such. The clarity is missing for this criterion, and that is very unfair for students who are currently pursuing JEE this year,” said activist Anubha Srivastava Sahai, who is helping students raise this matter in the Bombay High Court.
