An 18-year-old student recently lost his seat in the famous IIT Bombay for a 4 year Electrical Engineering course. This happened after the student unknowingly clicked on the ‘wrong’ link which read withdrawing from the process.
Siddhant Batra, the 18 year-old scholar from Agra secured AIR 270 in JEE Advanced 2020 after which he happily applied for a seat at IIT Bombay.
As soon as Siddhant got to know about the issue, he immediately posed his query to the respective department at IIT to which it said that it cannot intervene at this stage where all the seats for the course were full and admission rules had to be followed.
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Siddhant has now approached the Supreme Court seeking a direction to the institution to accept him.
On November 23, a division bench of Chief Justice Dipankar Datta and Justice G S Kulkarni dismissed Batra’s petition stating that IIT had considered his representation and passed its order.
In his petition to the supreme court, Batra has sought a direction to the IIT to consider his case on humanitarian grounds, and requested the creation of an additional seat to undo his loss.
Batra, who lives with his grandparents following the death of his parents, in the plea said he had worked hard against all odds to crack IIT JEE exams. He lost his father as a child and was brought up by his mother who died in 2018.
“On October 31, 2020 when Mr. Batra was surfing the IIT portal to check for further updates, he came upon a link which carried a declaration that read ‘I would like to withdraw from the seat allocation process of JoSAA (Joint Seat Allocation Authority),” the petition said.
After this, he inadvertently clicked on this link and stated “IIT Bombay, Electrical Engineering” as reasons for withdrawal, though this was never intended by him.
Later, in November 2020, when the final list of students came in the portal, Batra was shocked not to see his name.
The IIT, however, said that the withdrawal option was a ‘conscious’ two-step process.
In its clarification, IIT further said – “Candidates who wish to withdraw before the final round can do so and the ‘seat acceptance fee’ gets refunded. Once a candidate has withdrawn, then his/her seat stands cancelled.”
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