The qualification rate for Scheduled Caste (SC) and Scheduled Tribe (ST) candidates in JEE Advanced 2026 rose sharply by 9.8 and 8.1 percentage points, respectively, from last year, while women recorded their highest qualification rate of 23.4% in the six years covered in the Joint Implementation Committee (JIC) report the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Roorkee released on Saturday. It fell by 3.2 percentage points to 39.8% for general category candidates, and for Other Backward Classes-Non-Creamy Layer (OBC-NCL) declined by 0.7 percentage points to 17.5%.
The changes in qualification rates cannot be attributed to lower cut-offs, particularly since the qualifying marks rose across all categories this year. The JIC report does not attribute the category-wise changes to differences in candidate performance or the composition of the candidate pool. This does not mean every candidate up to that rank secured a seat, as allotment depends on rank, category, choices, programme preferences and seat availability. “Qualifying JEE Advanced is not an entitlement to an IIT seat.
A 2025 IIT Delhi and the University of Houston study found that the scheme increased the representation of women in traditionally male-dominated engineering branches and boosted the representation of SC/ST women at IITs. Those who participated submitted choices across the 23 IITs and their programmes. The last CRL candidate allotted an IIT seat through the gender-neutral pool had a CRL rank of 28,480. For women in the female-only pool, the last CRL rank allotted an IIT seat was 29,824.
The qualifying pool has always been kept larger than the number of seats so that counselling, category allocations and student choices can be accommodated,” he said.
“The qualifying criteria were relaxed to ensure at least twice the number of candidates qualified as compared to available seats in each category,” it says. Rao said that only about one-third of qualifiers secure IIT seats should not automatically mean faster expansion of IIT intake. He said expansion should be accompanied by faculty recruitment, laboratories, hostels, classrooms and student-support systems. IIT Kharagpur director Prof Suman Chakraborty said IIT seats’ expansion must keep pace with faculty, laboratories, classrooms, hostels and student-support systems. “The objective should not be the fastest possible expansion of seats, but the fastest possible expansion that does not dilute the quality of the IIT experience,” he said. Chakraborty suggested expanding access beyond physical campuses through an “Outreach Course Network” combining online learning with local academic partners, laboratories, mentoring and assessment.
