JEE Counselling for IITs Stopped Over PIL

The IIT-JEE (Advance) 2017 counselling process for IIT admissions has been restrained by the Supreme Court following a PIL alleging that the bonus marks were wrongly awarded to candidates.

The bench of Justices Dipak Misra and A M Khanwilkar passed orders restraining counselling for admissions to the IITs which was supposed to begin on Friday. The plea by some students had pointed out that there were was an error in the Hindi version of the question papers of chemistry and mathematics.

Grace marks were given to all candidates irrespective of whether the student attempted the question or not. They pleaded that this was unfair and affected their prospects. The bench has also restrained high courts from entertaining any petition related to the issue.

Out of 36,000 seats in 97 institutes, 29,425 candidates have accepted the allotted seats so far. The joint admission board of the IITs told the court that a committee of experts had decided to give bonus marks and any delay at this after evaluating all options.

The board was also apprehensive that a judicial intervention at this stage would create hurdles to the entire admission process.