MUMBAI: IIT-Bombay zone grabbed the top spot in the JEE Advanced 2021 results with the largest cohort of students in the first 500 ranks. IIT-Hyderabad followed, with IIT Delhi a close third, which is incidentally home to the highest number of top 10 rankers. Last year, the southern zone saw the best performance.
This time around, all eyes were on Jaipur boy Mridul Agarwal, all-India rank (AIR) 1, from IIT-Delhi zone who scored 348/360, or 96.6% — a feat not achieved ever since this entrance test took the two-tier form with JEE Advanced being the deciding criteria for admission to the premier tech institutes. IIT-Delhi zone also boasts the all-India girl topper Kavya Chopra (AIR 98). A total of 41,862 students cleared JEE(A) 2021, of whom 6,452 are female.
Both are set on joining the computer science programme: Mridul will join the Powai campus and Kavya will head to Delhi.

Both gave credit to their families for believing in them; “being consistent” was their secret sauce for cracking JEE (A).
The entrance results for the 23 IITs were announced on Friday.
The qualifying aggregate marks for common rank list dropped to 63, lower than last year’s 69; the minimum percentage to the aggregate score, however, remained constant at 17.5%. The total seats have increased to 16,232 from last year’s 16,053 and 13,000 in 2019.
“The criterion for qualification is such that we include candidates at least two times of the available seats in each category,” said JEE (Advanced) organising chairman Debashish Chakravarty. A general category candidate with 63 marks out of 360 is now eligible for a seat in the IITs. The qualifying aggregate marks were 69 (17.5%), 93, 90 and 128 in 2020, 2019, 2018 and 2017, respectively. The minimum qualifying marks in each subject this year is 6. “Each year is unique. One cannot compare the performance across years. When marks drop, either the questions are tougher or students did not perform up to the mark,” added Chakravarty.
Subhasis Chaudhuri, director, IIT-Bombay, said this year’s performances depended a lot on the local ecosystem around students. “Most students were preparing for the entrance tests from their homes. On account of the pandemic, learning was happening online. A cooperative ecosystem at home and better online training facilities could have made a difference in some zones,” said Chaudhuri.

While 77.2% of the total candidates who took the test are male, the success rate as a percentage of males who appeared is 32.4%. The number of female candidates qualifying stood at 6,452.
The supernumerary seats for women across campuses have gradually increased from 14% in 2018 to 20% last year to encourage them to opt for IITs for their undergraduate studies and to address their low participation in technical education. The additional 20% additional supernumerary seats will not have any effect on the existing seats.
Seven foreigners have also qualified in JEE (A), apart from 169 OCI/PIO candidates. There were more OBC candidates who took the exam this year compared with those from the general category: 51,789 (9,150 qualified) took the exam versus 40,950 (17,057 qualified) from the open category. In 2017, the total number of candidates offered a seat in the IITs was 10,576, which increased to 13,604 in 2019 and 16,061 last year.
(Inputs by Parul Kulshrestha and Shinjini Ghosh)