New Delhi: As many as 31,980 candidates have cleared the JEE-Advanced exam with the IIT's Joint Admission Board (JAB) issuing an extended merit list following directions from the HRD Ministry. The extended merit list was issued following meeting of the JAB on Thursday.


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"Choice filling on JoSAA (Joint Seat Allocation Authority) would be started on 15th June as scheduled earlier. Students in the extended merit list can start filling up their options along with others," an official statement said.


Earlier in the day, the HRD Ministry for the first time issued directions to the Indian Institute of Technology (IITs) to release a supplementary merit list for admission this year.


IIT Kanpur, which is the organising institute for JEE-Advanced this year, was asked to release the merit list with the number of candidates, which is twice the number of total seats on offer in each discipline and each category (general and reserved categories).


The institute was asked to release the supplementary merit list before choice-filling for joint seat allocation for IITs and NITs begins this week.


"Responding to requests from students and IIT community to proactively ensure that all reservation seats are duly filled, I have directed @IIT Kanpur conducting JEE advanced to make available candidates, strictly as per merit, twice the number of seats in each category," Union HRD Minister Prakash Javadekar tweeted.


The number of candidates who qualified the exam has always been at least twice the number of seats on offer. This year, however, the 18,138 students on the merit list are only 1.6 times the total seats, making it the smallest number of qualified candidates since 2012.