IIT aspirants worried
PATNA: Hundreds of Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) aspirants were in a worried lot on Tuesday as the joint online choice-filling and seat allocation portal for admission to the IITs was inaccessible almost the whole day.
They breathed a sigh of relief only after the website — http://jeeadv.iitkgp.ac.in/ — read an ‘appropriate compensation for the down time’. The deadline has been extended up to 10am on June 25.
June 24 was the last date for students to take part in the central counselling process for admission to the IITs, according to the guidelines. However, a notice on the website which was accessible again around 4:30pm on Tuesday, half an hour before the deadline for filling up the choices, read, “Due to technical problems in the JEE (Adv) — 2014 Server on 24 June 2014, the deadline of Online Choice Filling has been extended up to 10am of 25th June, 2014 for appropriately compensating for the down time.”
Delhi Public School (DPS), Patna, student Ayush Ranjan Keshav, whose OBC rank in JEE (Advanced) was just over 3,200, had to make some changes in the choices in his form. “Even on Monday, the website was unreachable for most part of the day. The same glitch was there on Tuesday,” Keshav said adding that he tried to contact authorities at IIT Kharagpur, Guwahati, Delhi and Patna, but to no avail. TOI’s attempt to contact IIT, Patna, officials didn’t bear any result either.
He added that many of his friends with eligible all India ranks also said the site has been down from 11.30am on Tuesday. Candidates claimed they had been experiencing problems from Saturday. On Saturday, clicking on the link led to a black page with the message, “Site is down for maintenance (till 6.30pm). Will be up again.” The site became functional again at the said time.
IIT-Kharagpur, the organizing IIT for this year’s JEE (Advanced), opened the page for candidates successful in the test to upload their choices at 9am last Friday. Within 12 hours, the system appeared to face problems. Coaching institutes and IIT faculty insist the counselling process is as important as taking the test and care should be taken to fill in as many choices as possible to remain in the race for admission to the 16 Indian Institute of Technologies (IITs).
