Supreme Court lifts stay on counselling for IITs

The Supreme Court on Monday gave the go-ahead for the IITs to conduct counselling and admission to premier engineering institutes for the successful candidates of the Joint Entrance Examination (Advanced) 2017. 

The court, however, asked them to develop a mechanism to avoid incorrect questions in the entrance examination, held for admission to IITs, NITs and others.

A three-judge bench, presided over by Justice Dipak Misra, vacated its July 7 stay on the whole admission process, observing, "You can't keep the student community in anxiety."

The court noted that all 33,307 students had already taken admission, including 10,987 in IITs. The court rejected a plea by senior advocates Kapil Sibal and Sanjay Hegde, appearing for some students, for preparation of fresh list of successful candidates as 18 bonus marks were awarded to all, affecting their



ranks. 

The bench said its 2005 judgement in the Gurunanak Dev University case would not apply to the present case as only 10,000 students were involved there. There were 1.56 lakh students who have taken the present examination.

On careful study of the Gurunanak Dev University case verdict, it is also revealed that there was no negative marking there, while in the present case there was negative marking for wrong questions attempted by the students, the court said.

Attorney General K K Venugopal submitted that such a situation would be avoided in future where the students were to be awarded bonus marks across the board for incorrect questions.

A counsel, appearing for the IITs, submitted that an expert body of 33 members from various institutes met twice and decided that award of bonus marks to the students across the board was the only solution to the problem.