(This story originally appeared in on Jun 20, 2012)

Life ban threat worked

NEW DELHI: Eight hundred IIT aspirants from the other backward classes ( OBC ), who made it past the Joint Entrance Exams, have stopped short of pressing their claim for the coveted admissions this year. This is a direct fallout of the JEE Committee slamming down on fake certificates. JEE is the body that administers joint entrance exams for all IITs and a few other institutes.Of the total 4.8 lakh students who appeared for the JEE, 4,805 OBC candidates got through. After the withdrawals, only 4,000 remained in the fray for the 2,604 IIT seats available in this category. All these seats have just been filled this week in the first round of counselling."A majority (of those who withdrew) did fear their chances of getting into IITs might fall due to fake certificates," says GB Reddy, organising chairman of IIT-JEE 2012.Effectively, one out of six OBC candidates who made it past the highly-competitive exams had pulled out or requested to be transferred to the general category, where they had to compete for an IIT seat on merit without the advantage of any reservation.Two hundred students asked to be considered under the general category, withdrawing their claim under the OBC quota for the first time ever. The remaining 600 students who had applied under the quota did not register for counselling. This figure is at least 500 more than the withdrawals seen last year.This year, IIT-JEE had came down hard against fake certificates and warned that such candidates, if detected, would be barred from IITs for life. There was also another reason for the withdrawals. Even within the OBC category, those coming from families with household income of less than Rs 4.5 lakh (excluding salary from a government job and agriculture) are considered under the non-creamy layer category and are eligible for reservation for government-sponsored educational and professional benefit programmes.There was a proposal to revise this to Rs 9 lakh and Rs 12 lakh for rural and urban centres. But this did not materialise. Candidates who had applied expecting this may also have pulled out later. "A warning was issued following some complaints from individuals, after the application process started, who called in to say many candidates who were claiming to be under the OBC category (non-creamy layer) did not belong to the category. The committee then cross-checked with the OBC Commission 's website and found it was true. Hence, we issued a warning," says Prof RK Shevgaonkar, director, IIT-Delhi, which is the organising institute for this year's JEE.Students who qualify under different reserved categories need to submit their category certificates by post at the time of counselling. Registration for counselling in all engineering colleges that accept JEE scores ended on June 10, and the first round of final seat allotment was announced on June 17. About 5.07 lakh students had applied for IITJEE this year. A total of 9,647 seats are available across 17 institutes, including the IITs, IT-BHU Varanasi and ISM Dhanbad.