Boys dominate JEE Main ranks, again
Aditi Tandon
Tribune News Service
New Delhi, April 27
JEE Mains 2017 results once again reveal the acute gender imbalance in India’s technical education sector with girls failing to make top grades and boys dominating rankings like always.
The trends this year are sharper with as many as 932 among 1,000 top rankers in JEE Mains being boys as against just 68 girls.
Likewise, among the 5,000 top rankers, 4,534 are boys and only 466 are girls.
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The top three ranks have also gone to boys (Kalpit Veerwal, Vasu Jain and Ananye Agarwal) while the highest scoring girl (Vrunda Rathi) in JEE Mains stands at rank 71.
The other two merit holders in the girls’ category (Poorva Garg and Narayana Reddy) are far behind boys in ranks and stand at the 96th and 102nd positions in the overall All India Merit.
JEE Mains rankings decide the entry of students to top central technical institutions, including the 30 National Institutes of Technology, formerly known as the regional engineering colleges.
Technical education institutions have long witnessed gender imbalance in India where stereotypes continue to guide students’ future careers.
The HRD Ministry’s data indicates that while girls continue to excel in most non-technical fields, boys retain their sway in technical sectors, especially engineering and technology.
Education experts say it’s a glass ceiling they will be happy to see Indian girls break.
Out of 11,86,454 candidates who registered for JEE Mains this year, 8,56,897 were boys. Of these, 2,21,427 candidates have been declared eligible to sit for JEE Advanced tests meant for entry to IITs.
Of these 2.21 lakh candidates, 1.09 lakh are in the general category, 60,299 in OBCs, 33,333 in SCs, 16,096 in STs and 2,114 in the persons with disability category.
