The state JEE board chairperson said on Friday that they could not publish the results of the JEE examination last month because of the OBC reservation dispute, now under legal scrutiny.

Sonali Chakravarti Banerjee said they are awaiting directives from the appropriate authorities before the publication of results.

The state JEE examination was held on April 27 and the results were to be published on June 5.

Many parents have written to the higher education department flagging concerns about prospective BTech students leaving Bengal.

Taranjit Singh, the president of a forum of private engineering colleges, said the delay in the publication of the results has prompted some prospective students to leave the state and take admission elsewhere.

“We had plans to publish the results on June 5. But we could not because of the OBC reservation issue, which is now sub-judice. We are awaiting directives from the appropriate quarters to publish the results,” Chakravarti Banerjee said in an address at the pre-counselling and education fair.

The fair was organised by the Association of Professional Academic Institutions (APAI), the forum of private engineering colleges.

Calcutta High Court on June 17 ordered an interim stay on the Bengal government’s June 8 notification classifying 140 sub-castes as other backward classes (OBC) that had been issued in response to an earlier court order cancelling all OBC certificates issued by the state after 2010.

The division bench of Justices Tapabrata Chakraborty and Rajasekhar Mantha issued the interim stay till July 31. The bench will next hear the case on July 24.

The state government is now awaiting the hearing of the petition in the high
court.

The Supreme Court is also likely to hear a petition that the state government has filed after the apex court resumes mid-July after the summer recess.

“In this scenario, the JEE board is not being able to draw the seat matrix factoring in the OBC reservation,” a JEE board official said.