An RTI application regarding IIM Ahmedabad admissions has taken the B-school circle by storm. The RTI query has disclosed that for the last academic year (2013-2015) the institute has ‘possibly’ admitted ST students with a percentile as low as 38.34%.

PaGaLGuY asked IIM-A to confirm and the reasons for the same but we got no response. The article below is purely on the speculation that the RTI query making the rounds is genuine.

The RTI also shows that the minimum CAT percentile for ST students has dropped from 83% for 2010-12 batch to 80% (2011-13). It further dropped to 60% (2012-14) and further down to 38.34% (2013-15).

This means the difference in the percentile between the General Category and ST for the 2013-2015 batch was a cool 59.94 percentile. And if you look at the figures over the years, this gap has only been increasing.

Ironically though, IIM-A’s cut-off for ST for the 2014-2016 batch is 70 percentile. It is worth asking why it dropped to a huge 38.34 last batch.

PaGaLGuY spoke to a couple of IIM professors in the absence of IIMA wanting to discuss this issue. They all asked to check whether the RTI revelations were genuine or simply made up. We have contacted Deepak Mehta who originally filed the RTI and we will follow up this article with his response. But since Deepak himself is an IIM-A alumnus, it seems unlikely that he will fudge the info.

One professor asked to check whether 38.34 was a sectional cut-off but even for a sectional cut-off the figure of 38.34 is unusually low. “Usually the IIMs do not go below 45 per centile to 38.34 seems really unlikely,” added one professor.

Professors also said that if at all 38.34 was a fact, there were other factors that have gone into the ST candidates securing admission at IIM-A. “There are interviews and other criteria tested so just talking about admission on the basis of the CAT score is not right,” said a professor.

It may be noted that in 2008, MHRD made it mandatory for the IIMs to keep aside 15% of their seats for candidates belonging to Scheduled Casts, 7.5% to Scheduled Tribes, and 27% to Other Backward Classes (OBC).