Supreme Court Directs IIT Bombay To Grant Interim Admission To Student Who Lost Admission After Clicking Wrong Link

The Supreme Court on Wednesday came to the relief of an 18 year old student who lost his admission to IIT-Bombay after he inadvertently clicked a wrong link during the online admission process.

A bench of Justices S K Kaul, Dinesh Maheshwari and Hrishikesh Roy passed an interim order directing IIT Bombay to grant provisional admission to Siddhant Batra, a student hailing from Agra, who had secured an all-India rank of 270 in JEE.

The bench also issued notice to the institution and fixed the plea for hearing after winter break. 

"In the meantime, by interim order, we direct that the petitioner should be permitted to join the respondent-institution and pursue his course subject to fulfillment of all other formalities", the bench ordered.

The Special Leave Petition in the SC was filed by Advocate Pratiksha Sharma and was argued today by Senior Advocate Basava Prabhu S Patil.

The plea was filed in the apex court against the Bombay High Court judgment dismissing his petition seeking to secure his admission. The High Court dismissed his petition after IIT stated that it was not possible to intervene at this stage as all seats for the course were full. The High Court had asked the Institute to consider Siddhant's plea as a representation which was finally rejected.

"From a reading of the representation dated 21.11.2020, it is clear that the Respondents have rejected the same on their own interpretation of the declaration stated herein above and have construed the withdrawal of the Petitioner from the further seat allocation process of withdrawn from the seat already allotted in First round...", says the SLP

Siddhant, who lives with his grandparents following the death of his parents, stated that he had worked hard against all odds to crack IIT JEE exams.

In the plea, it was averred that while filling out the admission process online, he came upon a page with 'freeze' option, which he thought, meant confirming the seat and the completion of his admission process.

The petitioner has stated that he bona fidely felt that since he has already been allotted the seat of his choice, he need not participate any further in the subsequent round of seat allocation process which was for the candidates who were not allotted seat in Round 1.

"On October 31, 2020 when he 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.

Following this, in November when the final list was drawn and came out, the petitioner noticed, "to his utter shock", that his name stood excluded.

It is stated that in the instant case, the Institute had the powers and the authority to grant a superintendence seat to the petitioner as per Section 13 of the IIT Act, 1961 but they still rejected the petitioner's representation.

Click here to read/download the order