Govt directs IITs to issue supplementary merit list for JEE-Advanced

In a first, the HRD Ministry has issued directions to the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) to release a supplementary merit list for admission this year.

IIT Kanpur, the organising institute for JEE-Advanced this year, has been asked to release a merit list with the number of candidates, which is twice the number of total seats on offer in each discipline and each category (general and reserved categories).

The institute will have to release the supplementary merit list before choice-filling for joint seat allocation for IITs and NITs begins this week.

"Responding to requests from students and IIT community to proactively ensure that all reservation seats are duly filled, I have directed @IIT Kanpur conducting JEE advanced to make available candidates, strictly as per merit, twice the number of seats in each category," Union HRD Minister Prakash Javadekar tweeted.

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The number of candidates who qualified the exam has always been at least twice the number of seats on offer.

This year, however, the 18,138 students on the merit list are only 1.6 times the total seats, making it the smallest number of qualified candidates since 2012.