MUMBAI: More girls qualified this year to join the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology , but none made it to the top-100 ranks. Riya Singh, the topper among the girls this year, got an all-India rank of 133, according to the results of the IIT entrance test, JEE-Advanced 2016, declared on Sunday. That was worse than last year, when there was one girl candidate among the first 100, ranked 47.In 2014, there were five girls in the top 100. Of the 36,566 who qualified to join IITs from the 1,47,678 appeared, girls comprised 12.49%, better than last year’s 11.54%. Also, their representation this year had been better: 23.16% of those who appeared for the JEE-Advanced were girls, compared with 17.35% in last year’s total of 1,17,237 students. The IIT-Bombay zone had the highest number of successful candidates for the third year running. Most number of top 10 rank holders were from the IIT-Madras zone.The top rank went to Jaipur’s Aman Bansal, with 320 out of the total 372 marks. Yamuna Nagar, Haryana’s Bhavesh Dhingra came second, followed by Kunal Goyal of Jaipur . Bansal and Goyal are from the IIT-Bombay zone, which had 8,810 of the total candidates who have qualified.Bansal, whose father is a government employee and mother housewife, said he aspires to do something of his own in the field of education . While more girls have qualified in the JEE-Advanced this year, not being able to make it to the top ranks means they may find it difficult to get through to coveted streams such as computer science and engineering seats at top IITs such as Bombay, Madras and Delhi . Historically, the highest rank holders prefer to opt for computer science and engineering. At IIT-Bombay, computer science seats are usually filled up by rank 50-60.“I believe that more women must pursue STEM courses and am glad that this year, the exam has seen more women applying,” said Biocon Chairman Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw “As more and more women get accepted into the job market , their competitive spirit will also improve and they’ll fare better in the top ranks as well.”The huge volume of traffic took its toll on the JEE Advanced portal, even as IIT-Guwahati, the organising institute for JEE-Advanced this year, did its best to cope. Even five hours after the results were declared, a bulk of the nearly 1.47 lakh students who sat for the exam were unable to access their results.