Other Backward Classes students have outperformed their peers from the general category in this year’s Class XII board exams held by eight state boards, including Bengal’s.

The differential cutoff marks for the top 20 percentile scorers across the school boards also show that Scheduled Caste students have outdone general category students under the Nagaland board. Scheduled Tribe students have performed on a par with general students under the Goa board.

Rights groups said these data had exploded the “myth of merit” — the claim that reservations victimise the purportedly more meritorious general-category students — that some forward caste people invoke to oppose reservations.

The Joint Seat Allocation Authority, which holds common counselling for admission to BTech courses at the National Institutes of Technology and the Indian Institutes of Technology, collects exam-score data from every school board in the country. This is because one of the eligibility conditions for IIT admission is 75 per cent marks or a top 20 percentile score in the board exam.

The Authority has so far collected the results and percentile cutoff data from the boards of 22 states as well as the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) and the Council for Indian School Certificate Examination (CISCE) for 2025.

According to the data, the top 20 percentile cutoff score for (non-creamy layer) OBC students has been higher than that of general students from the state boards of Bengal, Rajasthan, Assam, Jharkhand, Maharashtra, Manipur, Meghalaya and Mizoram.

The All India Other Backward Classes Employees Federation and the National Confederation of Dalit Organisations said people were capable of achieving excellence irrespective of their caste if given the opportunity.

“Some people cite ‘merit’ arguments to reject reservation. Actually, every person is born with potential,” the Dalit rights body’s chairman, Ashok Bharti, said. “Reservation has helped the Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and OBCs rise in life. It has helped minimise the gap between the forward castes and others. The policy should continue with much more vigour.”

G. Karunanidhy, head of the OBC employees’ federation, dismissed the “merit argument”, saying it’s effort and support that make the difference.