As the IIT-Guwahati, the organising institute, decided not to extend the date of registration for the Joint Entrance Examination (Advanced), a number of aspirants and several student organisations approached the Union Education Ministry and the National Testing Agency demanding more time to submit applications.
While the Students Federation of India (SFI) wrote to Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan seeking his intervention, a delegation of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), a pro-government students’ union, met the NTA officials with a request to extend the last date for registration, which was on May 7.
SFI general secretary Mayukh Biswas told The Hindu that the NTA was not holding examinations in a transparent manner. “They are taking an exclusionary attitude and several students will not be able to sit for the JEE (Advanced). The last two days for the submission was Saturday and Sunday and the IIT-Guwahati did not respond to the queries on technical problems. We understand that about 40,000 applications were not processed,” Mr. Biswas said adding that the SFI had written to Mr. Pradhan on this.
In foolproof manner
Milind Marathe, former national president of the ABVP, said a delegation of the ABVP headed by its national general secretary Yagywalkya Shukla met the NTA officials and submitted a memorandum. “We have demanded that the date for submission be extended. In the past years, such extensions were given considering the technical problems faced by the students. We expect the NTA to conduct all examinations in a foolproof manner. In the recently held UGC National Eligibility Test too, there were a lot of complaints on hacking the computers,” Mr. Marathe said.
An IIT aspirant, who is eligible to appear for the JEE (Advanced) after the JEE (Main), said his mother sold her jewellery to send him to a coaching institute. “I am from a village and was facing difficulty in submitting the form. I tried on Saturday (May 6) and Sunday (May 7), but no one responded from IIT-Guwahati. We were given very limited time to complete the registration process from April 30 to May 7,” he added. Another student complained that the students’ helpline was not available to him. “We wrote mails, but got a ready-made reply that registration is closed,” he said.
Bishnupada Mandal, the organising chairman of the examinations, had told The Hindu on Wednesday that the institute received about 1.95 applications for the examinations from 2.5 lakh qualified candidates after the JEE (Main). “Usually, the applications are received in four or five days. This year, we had eight days for registration and one day for payment of the fees. Dates were quite longer and a good number of candidates registered and we do not have any scope for extending the date now,” he said.
