IIM Lucknow

New Delhi, Oct. 18: The Centre is counting students from Other Backward Classes who have made it to the IITs and the IIMs to “prove” that the premier institutes have been out of reach for most.

The government believes the headcount — of students over the past decade — will show that far fewer than 27 per cent OBC candidates have made it to the Indian institutes of technology and the Indian institutes of management without reservation.

This information will be used by additional solicitor-general Gopal Subramanium to argue in the Supreme Court in favour of reservation, top government sources have revealed. Subramanium is the government counsel in the OBC quota case.

“The census of OBCs will help prove that students from these communities, which form 27 per cent of the country’s population, have received far less representation at these institutes,” a source at the ministry of human resource development said.

All six IIMs, seven IITs and Banaras Hindu University (BHU), which admits students based on the IIT entrance tests, have been asked to provide lists of all students over the past 10 years.

The IITs and BHU have already sent the lists, officials said. The IIMs, which had taken on the government over the quota law, are yet to do so. They are being given more time because they are going through administrative changes.

Directors of IIM Ahmedabad and IIM Bangalore retired this month, and senior professors are in charge of the administration. The director of IIM Calcutta is due to retire by November.

Since admission forms have never had a separate column identifying OBC students, ministry officials are painstakingly counting the numbers based on the students’ names.

Initial counting, an official said, suggested that OBCs formed around 10 per cent of the student population at IITs.

The ministry has also asked all technical institutes — including private engineering, management, medicine and architecture schools — to provide information on seats that lie vacant.

“While the IITs and IIMs have said no general category seats ever remain vacant, data from some of the other colleges show they have vacant general category seats,” an official said.

This data, the government hopes, will help buttress its claim that lowering the cut-off marks for OBCs would help colleges fill their seats.

Some senior officials, however, are learnt to have warned that the OBC “census” and the count of vacant seats may backfire on the government. The anti-quota lobby would use this data to back its claim that OBCs were “inherently less meritorious”, they fear.

The government decision to introduce a quota for OBCs in institutes of higher education from the current academic session had been challenged in court, which ordered a stay.