Will JEE 2013 reserve seats for SC/ST/OBC students?

The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE), New Delhi conducts the JEE (Main) 2013 exam, will shortlist candidates for the second and final round, JEE (Advanced), based on their performance in the first.

Thousands of students from reserved category asking JEE board, Will they reserve some seats for SC/ST & OBC students.

The reason is that reserved category students who appeared for JEE (Main) were required to do so merely based on their caste or tribe claim (SC, ST or OBC), without any supporting documents.

While SC (15%) and ST (7.5%) claims are rarely false, OBC (27%) claims often are. This is generally not deliberate and arises out of mismatches between state and central OBC category lists.

Last year, out of 4,800 OBC candidates who qualified for the IITs, 800 withdrew their claims and sought seats in the open (general) category.

"Several times, students claim they belong to a particular caste, which is considered as OBC by his or her state, but not by the Centre. Such candidates are rejected," said an IIT official. "Also, non-creamy layer certificates are issued every financial year. If one is outdated (as income can change every year), it is rejected. Every IIT gets such cases."

Caste or tribe proof documents are usually sought at the time of admission. But this year, the documents should have been a requirement at the application stage given the two-tier exam system, said Dr Ishwarchandra Nagre, a parent from Aurangabad. "Even if a couple of thousand reserved category students make false claims or fail to produce valid documents, the same number of genuine students who could not get selected because of scoring less than the false-claim students will miss their chance to try for a coveted IIT seat."

Only 1,50,000 of the top rankers in JEE (Main), which includes students from all categories (GE, OBC (NCL), SC and ST) will be eligible to appear in JEE Advanced (hitherto known as IIT-JEE) for admission to IITs, IIT BHU and ISM Dhanbad.

Applying quotas, around 40,500 candidates will be OBC, 22,500 SC and 11,250 ST.

CBSE chairman Vineet Joshi said he did not know the IITs' admission process. "I will have to discuss it with the IITs to see if there is merit in the claim and what should be done about it."

The results of JEE (Main) with the eligibility list for JEE (Advanced) will be declared on May 7.

The JEE Advanced 2013 examination scheduled to be held on Sunday, 2 June, 2013.