16-year-old from Hyderabad youngest IIT-JEE topper

MUMBAI: Like the
past six years, IIT-
Bombay zone,
home to Kota, will
send the largest
pool of students
to the Indian
Institutes of
Technology. Top
honours, however,
went to the
southern zone
that produced
possibly the
youngest-ever rank 1 – 16-year-
old Prudhvitej Immadi of
Hyderabad – and bagged four
other slots in the top 10.
Of the seven zones (sliced on the
basis of the old IITs), the western
region saw the highest number
of students qualify – 3,336. IIT-
Madras zone will send 3,126
candidates to the 15 tech
schools. Delhi zone took third
place with 2,138 successful
candidates, with Dravyansh
Sharma of DPS Ghaziabad
ranking seventh overall.
Among the top-100 students, 32
come from the western zone
while 30 are from the south. The
IIT-Bombay zone has the highest
number of candidates in the top
1,000 ranks — 290. The best
ratio of number of students who
appeared to those who qualified
in the JEE went to IIT-Madras
zone. In all, 13,602 students
cleared the exam.
"Only 481 students of the 8,325
students who took the JEE from
Mumbai city qualified. Another
1,508 candidates out of 39,483
from Rajasthan, many of whom
prepared from coaching centres
in Kota, made the cut," said Jaya
Joshi, IIT-Bombay's public
relation officer.
In all, of the 4.68 lakh students
who took the JEE in April, 13,602
qualified; another 400-odd
candidates have been shortlisted
to join the year-long preparatory
course.
Rajasthan boy Shubham Mehta
topped the IIT-Bombay zone at
AIR2 (All India Rank); Dravyansh
Sharma (rank 7) from the IIT-
Delhi region; Archit Gupta (rank
14) was on top in the IIT-Kanpur
area; Ankit Jalan (rank 45) from
the IIT-Kharagpur zone; Kunal
Chawla (rank 6) from the IIT-
Roorkee region and Amol (rank
41) from the IIT-Guwahati zone
were the region-wise toppers.
Overall scores and subject-wise
cut-offs went up a bit. Faculty
attributed the rise to the errors
in the question paper, for which
the IITs had no option but to
give marks to everyone.
IIT-Kanpur director said across
India, the performance of
reserved category students
improved. Of the 2,545 OBC
candidates who qualified, 1,540
made it to the common merit list.
In case of SC students, of the
1,950 who qualified, 122 made it
without the handicap of score
relaxation and of the 645 ST
candidates shortlisted to join the
IITs, 33 made it to the common
rank list.
In all, the 15 IITs, IT-BHU and ISM
Dhanbad, have 9,618 seats. Of
these, 4,858 are for the general
category, 2,597 for OBCs, 1442
for SCs and 721 for STs.