Devdutta Majhi from West Bengal’s Purba Bardhaman district emerged as this year’s top-ranked female candidate in the common rank list (CRL) of JEE (Advanced) 2025, with an overall rank of CRL 16.
Ms Majhi, who topped from the IIT Kharagpur zone, obtained 312 marks out of a total of 360.
In this year’s JEE (Mains) examination, she had also secured a top rank in the Session 2 Paper 1 (BE/BTech) with a perfect 100 percentile score.
“I am very happy with the results. I had a good feeling after the examination, I knew it went well. I love mathematics a lot, so I want to join the BTech course for maths and computing at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore,” Ms Majhi told The Hindu on Monday.
She added that her second choice would be the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Madras.
“For my preparation, I did not join any particular coaching institute. I would study diligently at home, and I appeared for several mock tests for practice,” Ms Majhi said.
Ms Majhi has a proven record of academic excellence. A student of Katwa Durgadasi Chaudhurani Girls’ High School in Purba Bardhaman district, she ranked sixth in the State in this year’s class 12 board examination conducted by the West Bengal Council of Higher Secondary Education.
In 2023, in the class 10 Madhyamik board examination conducted by the West Bengal Board of Secondary Education, Ms Majhi had secured the first rank in the State by scoring 697 out of 700 marks.
Chief Minister of West Bengal, Mamata Banerjee, took to social media to congratulate Ms Majhi.
“Today’s JEE Advanced 2025 examination results show that you have been topper among all girls in the entire country, and the highest rank holder in the IIT Kharagpur zone. You achieved top ranks in our Secondary and Higher Secondary examinations earlier, and now you are the topper girl of India!” Ms Banerjee wrote.
Despite many girl students proving their merit in these pan-India entrance examinations, the gender ratio among students, particularly in the IITs, remains largely skewed.
According to the Union Ministry of Education’s response to a question in the Lok Sabha in 2023, the government had decided to push for female representation in IITs by increasing their enrollment in the IITs’ B.Tech. programmes from 8% to 14% in 2018-19, 17% in 2019-20 and 20% in 2020-21 through supernumerary seats.
Furthermore, the Central government also encouraged the institutions to improve their gender ratio through special scholarships for female students, counselling activities for JEE (Advanced)-qualified female students, special open house outreach programmes for female high school students to encourage them towards Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM), etc.
Published – June 03, 2025 02:09 am IST
