there are 1134 OBC students among the 8652 rank-holders in this year’s JEE.
In the absence of detailed data from the IITs, all we have got are bits of information. Here’s a news report (supposed to have been sourced from DNA, but I could not locate it on the DNA site), which claims that all the 1,134 rank-holders from the OBC category are in the “open merit list”. It goes on to quote some IIT official:
This is 14.35% of the general category. 8,652 candidates have qualified to seek admission to 6,872 seats available. Last year, 13.74% OBC candidates had made it to the IITs without reservation.
“The OBC candidates have secured good ranks and all are in the common merit list,” said a JEE official.
“So, a relaxed criterion may not need to be invoked for them.”
Now, the figure of 14.35% is wrong; 1134 out of 8652 comes out to 13.1 percent. More substantively, the last statement is confusing because iffy statements (such as “may not need to”) are meaningless when the results are already known — either a relaxed criterion was used, or it was not!
Anyways, I think the following interpretation is reasonable: Since the overall quantum of OBC reservation (X percent — I think X is 9 — in existing IITs and 27 percent in the six new IITs) works out to a number smaller than 13.1 percent (and since OBC students already form 13.1 percent of the JEE rank-holders) there was no need to invoke a relaxation in the cut-off marks for OBC students.
Is this interpretation correct?
[Here's yet another bit: I found a blog post that says that someone with an overall rank of 2902 has an OBC rank of 367. Thus, about 12.5 percent of the top 3000 ranks belong to OBCS.]
The news report says that on the first of August, the IITs will make all the JEE-related information public on their website. We’ll have to wait until then …
Filed under: jee | Tagged: iit jee 2008, obc
