IIT Kharagpur

New Delhi, July 8: The human resource development ministry has asked IIT Kharagpur to explain discrepancies in the 2006 admission process of the Indian Institutes of Technology that may have denied seats to 994 deserving candidates.

Top officials said the ministry’s move to seek an explanation on the selection procedure from the Kharagpur institute, in charge of IIT admissions that year, followed concerns raised by a Parliament committee.

The IIT is also expected to be quizzed on the controversial admissions at a meeting of the board of governors on July 9, ministry sources said.

“We have, in more ways than one, indicated our unhappiness over the controversy. We have also asked IIT Kharagpur to explain its position,” a senior official said.

The ministry is likely to be represented by higher education secretary R.P. Agrawal at the July 9 meeting, sources said. Agrawal is a member of the IIT Kharagpur board of governors.

“The contradictions in the admissions thrown up by news reports are part of the agenda for the board meeting,” the official confirmed.

On August 6, 2007, The Telegraph had revealed that the IITs used cutoffs different from the ones thrown up by using the formula that the institutes claimed to have used.

In response to Right to Information Act applications filed by candidates and their parents, the IIT had said it used 37, 48 and 55 as cutoff marks in math, physics and chemistry in 2006.

But the formula that the IITs said they used to arrive at the cutoffs actually threw up 7, 4 and 6 as the minimum marks required in the three subjects to be eligible for the second round of qualification.

Students who clear all three subject cutoffs are selected on the basis of their aggregate score — the total of the three subjects. Failure to meet a subject cutoff rules out a student even if he has a high aggregate cutoff.

As many as 994 candidates who were denied admission in 2006 might have cleared the IIT entrance exam that year had the institutes followed their stated method of determining subject cutoffs, calculations later revealed.

The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Human Resource Development, which has Rahul Gandhi among its members, expressed concerns over the controversy surrounding IIT admissions at its last meeting, documents available with The Telegraph show.

The committee, at its meeting in late April, asked the HRD ministry to explain how the IITs arrive at their cutoffs.