Government constitutes 'Bhaskar Ramamurthy Committee'

Union Ministry of Human Resource Development (HRD) has proposed to set up a five-member committee to suggest changes to JEE (Advanced) in the wake of an inadequate number of candidates qualifying the entrance test this year.

• The committee will be headed by IIT-Madras director Bhaskar Ramamurthy.

About the committee:

• The mandate of the committee is to develop a robust and scientifically designed entrance exam system to test potential of candidates as well as to reduce their dependence on coaching institutes.
• Other members of the committee will include Abhay Karandikar (Director of IIT-Kanpur), Vineet Joshi (Director General of National Testing Agency) and Professor Kannan Moudgalya of IIT-Bombay.

Interesting to know:

• The first merit list for JEE (Advanced) 2018 had only 18,138 candidates, which was only 1.6 times the total sanctioned seats.
• It was the smallest pool of qualified candidates since 2012.
• It was also very less than the mandated requirement of twice the number of seats on offer.
• This had forced HRD Ministry to step in at the last-minute and order IIT Kanpur (which had organised JEE-Advanced this year) to release list of candidates, twice the number of seats in each discipline and category (strictly as per merit) prior to starting the choice filling through JoSAA (Joint Seat Allocation Authority).
• Subsequently, IIT Kanpur added another 13842 candidates (8,954 general, 3,824 OBC, 771 SCs and 293 from ST category) to the merit list, taking total up to 31,980 candidates.
• To avoid such incident in future, HRD Ministry has proposed to set up a five-member member Committee.

Questions:

Q1. Union Ministry of Human Resource Development (HRD) has proposed to set up a five-member committee to suggest changes to whom in the wake of an inadequate number of candidates qualifying the entrance test this year?
a. CAT
b. CLAT
c. JEE (Advanced)
d. None of the above

Q2. The committee will be headed by?
a. Bhanu Ramamurthy
b. Bhaskar Ramamurthy
c. Bheem Ramamurthy
d. None of the above