JEE 2009 results announced

A little over 10,000 students have cleared the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) conducted by the Indian Institutes of Technology this year. The results were announced on Monday.

Of the 3,84,977 candidates who took the JEE on April 12, 10,035 have qualified for admission to the 8,295 seats in the 15 IITs, Banaras Hindu University's Institute of Technology in Varanasi, and Indian School of Mines University, Dhanbad. (The number of students on the merit list is always more than the seats available).

Like last year, IIT Bombay zone again boasts of the maximum number of candidates (3,379) to have cracked the JEE. Forty-six candidates from the zone figure in the top 100 on the merit list. The number of candidates who appeared in JEE-2009 was nearly 24% more than in 2008; in IIT Bombay zone, there was an increase of nearly 32% in the number of IIT aspirants.

Of the 1,04,045 OBC candidates who took the JEE, 1,930 have qualified. Incidentally, 1,379 of them have made it to the common merit list. This year, the IITs implemented the 10% relaxation in the cut-off for the category vis-à-vis the general category. "This year, 120% OBCs (in relation to the seats reserved for them) have qualified after implementation of the 10% relaxation," professor Gautam Barua, director, IIT Guwahati, which is the organising institute for JEE 2009, said. Last year, the IITs did not have to relax the cut-off for the OBCs because all the seats reserved for them were filled by OBC candidates who figured on the common merit list too, he said.

Approximately 1,594 seats are reserved for the category. In older IITs, which are implementing reservation for OBCs in a phased manner, 18% of the seats are be reserved for the category; new IITs are implementing the 27% reservation.

Of the 36,117 Scheduled Caste candidates who took the JEE, 967 have qualified, while 208 of the 12,484 from the Scheduled Tribes category have qualified. "The number of SC candidates in JEE 2009 was 21.4% more than JEE 2008; the number of students who qualified has also gone up marginally by 0.25% compared to last year," AK Pani, JEE 2009 chairman, IIT Bombay, said.

"Despite a 50% relaxation for SC and ST students in cut-off compared to the cut-off for the general category, the number of SC students who qualified is only 75% of the seats reserved for them (last year's figure was 69%); in the case of the ST category, the percentageof those who have qualified is only 33% (it was 32% in JEE 2008) of the available seats," Barua said. The IITs have declared that 473 SC and 641 ST candidates have qualified -- with further relaxation in cut-off -- for their preparatory course.

In the general category, 6,823 candidates have qualified for admission to 4,784 seats.
Counselling for admissions will be held from June 9-16. Selected candidates will be allocated courses on June 24 ...