Andhras 16 year old aces IIT-JEE at first go to be youngest topper

Updated on: Friday, May 27, 2011

Like the past six years, the IIT-Bombay zone, home to Kota, will send the largest pool of students to the Indian Institutes of Technology. It is, however, not the best in terms of number of students who appeared to those who qualified in the Joint Entrance Exam (JEE). That distinction goes to the IIT-Madras zone.

Moreover, the southern zone has not only provided possibly the youngest-ever topper – Prudhvitej Immadi, aged 16 – but also bagged four other slots on the top 10 list. IIT-Bombay can take solace that Prudhvitej, who took the exam for the first time, will come here to study electrical engineering. An analysis of the top-100 students, available with TOI, shows that 32 hail from the western zone while 30 from the south. The IIT-Bombay zone also has the highest number of candidates in the top 1, 000 ranks – 290.

In terms of hard numbers, of all the seven zones (sliced on the basis of the old IITs), the western region saw the highest number of students qualify to enter the IITs – 3,336. As many as 82, 525 candidates took the test from the zone. The IIT-Madras zone, which saw 62, 880 candidates sit for the JEE, will send 3, 126 candidates to the 15 tech schools. “Only 481 students of the 8, 325 students who took the JEE from Mumbai city qualified. Another 1, 508 candidates out of 39, 483 from Rajasthan, many of whom prepared from coaching centres in Kota, made the cut,” said Jaya Joshi, IIT-Bombay’s public relations officer.

In all, of the 4.68 lakh students who took the JEE in April, 13, 602 qualified; another 400-odd have been shortlisted to join the year-long preparatory course.

IIT-B zone sends most students to tech schools

However, Kota’s biggest disappointment was that it once again lost the top slot to Andhra Pradesh, a state that has earned a moniker – the new Kota. Rajasthan boy Shubham Mehta topped the IIT-Bombay zone at AIR2 (All India Rank); Dravyansh Sharma (AIR7) cracked the JEE from the IIT-Delhi region; Archit Gupta (AIR14) was on top in the IIT-Kanupr area; Ankit Jalan (AIR45) from the IIT-Kharagpur zone; Kunal Chawla (AIR6) from the IIT-Roorkee region and Amol (AIR41) from the IIT-Guwahati zone were the region-wise toppers.

Overall scores and subject-wise cut-offs went up a bit. Faculty attributed the rise to the errors in the question paper, for which the IITs had no option but to give marks to everyone. This year, the IITs acknowledged that there were errors adding to 36 marks. Several students who left the erroneous questions unanswered felt they were the biggest losers. “Firstly, we spend time trying to answer those questions. When we felt there was some problem with them, we left them unanswered for the fear of negative marking. We lost out on a rank for no fault of ours,” said Pradumnya Joshi, a disappointed student.

IIT-Kanpur director Sanjay Dhande said that across India, the reserved category students’ report card had improved. Of the 2, 545 OBC candidates who qualified, 1, 540 made it to the common merit list. In case of SC students, of the 1, 950 who qualified, 122 made it without the handicap of score relaxation and of the 645 ST candidates shortlisted to join the IITs, 33 made it to the common rank list.

Jagna Varun (AIR9) is the OBC topper; Ashish Sonone (AIR718) came first on the SC merit list and Banoth Ramakrishna (AIR 177) topped the ST merit list. In all, the 15 IITs, ITBHU and ISM, Dhanbad, have a total of 9, 618 seats, apportioned as: 4, 858 for the general category, 2, 597 for OBCs, 1, 442 for SCs and 721 for STs.

Andhras 16 year old aces IIT-JEE at first go to be youngest topper

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