Calcutta, June 13: Calcutta High Court today ruled in favour of IIT Kharagpur in a case over the 2006 admissions, where a mismatch between the stated and practised selection methods was said to have denied IIT seats to 994 students.

The controversy related to the way the premier institutes had fixed the subject cutoff marks for the two lakh-odd students who sat the 2006 joint entrance examination (JEE).

Justice Biswanath Samaddar held there was nothing wrong with the cutoff marks fixed by the Joint Admission Board (JAB), which conducts the JEE, in 2006. IIT Kharagpur was in charge of the admission process that year.

“The court did not get into the process of (how the cutoff marks were determined). We submitted to the court that the cutoff marks were applicable to all candidates and the question of any discrimination could not arise,” said R.N. Mazumdar, who appeared for the JEE authorities along with Malay Basu.

Student Sanchit Bansal, who had failed to make it to the merit list, had challenged the admission process in the high court.

Bansal claimed he had met the aggregate cutoff, and argued that the authorities had wrongly increased the subject cutoffs.

Had they not been pushed up, he said, he and many other unsuccessful candidates would have cleared the exam.

The cutoffs the IITs had used were 37 in mathematics, 48 in physics and 55 in chemistry. Bansal’s lawyer Pulak Mondal argued the cutoffs were not determined properly.

Justice Samaddar rejected Bansal’s petition and observed that it was within the domain of the JAB to determine the way in which the cutoffs would be fixed.

Bansal had taken the Central Information Commission’s help to obtain the IITs’ declared procedure for calculating the cutoffs, and filed the case in June last year on the basis of this information.

Mondal is talking to his clients about approaching the high court’s division bench.