New Delhi: The Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), Pune, and the Satyajit Ray Film & Television Institute (SRFTI), Kolkata, are under scrutiny after students discovered that the institutes had miscalculated how reservation seats were to be allotted during the 2024–25 admissions cycle.

On September 27, SRFTI released their merit lists for the 2024-25 admissions cycle of the SRFTI Entrance Test (SRFTIET). The students began comparing their ranks and marks in WhatsApp and Telegram groups. The pattern was unmistakable: several candidates from Scheduled Caste (SC), Scheduled Tribe (ST), and Other Backward Class (OBC) backgrounds who had scored high enough to qualify in the General list were missing from both the General and reserved lists. "We had effectively disappeared from the system," said one SC candidate to The Wire.

This repeated again on October 17, when FTII released their merit lists for the 2024-25 admissions cycle of the FTII Entrance Test (FTIIET).

This discovery led students to accuse both institutes of misapplying reservation rules in admissions; an error that, they say, resulted in fewer SC, ST, and OBC candidates entering these public institutions than the law requires.

Policy

FTII and SRFTI have been admitting students through the Joint Entrance Test (JET) until last year. This was changed this year to individual entrance tests for each institute.

At the centre of the present dispute is a fundamental principle followed widely across higher education in India: if a reserved-category candidate scores high enough to qualify for the General list on the basis of their score, they must first be placed there. This ensures that the full quota of reserved seats remains available to those who require them. Students say that instead of applying this rule at the end of the process, FTII and SRFTI froze candidates into their categories much earlier, even when some of them had scored high enough to qualify as General category candidates on merit. As a result, the total number of SC, ST, and OBC students admitted in the final lists became lower than it could have been.

How students caught the error

The misapplication of the rule came to light when students began comparing results after the merit lists were released on October 17. Several reserved-category candidates with marks higher than those admitted in the General lists were absent from those lists entirely. In one case from FTII’s Film Wing's programme, an SC candidate was initially placed in the General waiting list despite having a score that would have placed him near the top of the SC list. After students challenged the list, he was moved into the correct category; but in the process, he was removed from a separate one-year programme in which he had originally ranked near the top. The correction required the institute to create an additional seat, which the candidate said was evidence of a system without transparent checks.

Another candidate from FTII, whose name was missing altogether from the first list, received an admission offer only after the revised list was issued. “I didn’t become more deserving in one week,” the candidate told The Wire. “The system only corrected itself because we compared notes.” The sequence of corrections, revisions, and unexplained changes has led students to describe the process as one where transparency has been replaced by guesswork and manual intervention.

Response

FTII published a revised merit list on October 24, attributing the discrepancies to “Excel formula errors.” In a closed-door meeting on October 27, Vice-Chancellor Dhiraj Singh acknowledged that the original lists contained “serious mistakes.” However, instead of revising the rankings and applying reservation norms correctly, FTII chose to add supernumerary seats – additional seats created to accommodate excluded candidates without displacing those already admitted.

Students argue this solution avoided confronting the central problem: that reservation was applied incorrectly in the first place.

Meanwhile, SRFTI has not issued any public explanation for the inconsistencies in its lists.

The controversy has drawn attention to broader structural and procedural issues at both institutes. Neither FTII nor SRFTI releases answer keys, mark sheets, or scoring rubrics. Evaluations are not anonymous; students say their names appeared on answer scripts. The interview stage, which carries between 70% to 80% of the total weightage in admissions, has no published scoring criteria, no breakdown of marks, and no review or challenge mechanism. Candidates describe the interview as a decisive but undocumented process that determines who is able to enter the country’s most influential state-run filmmaking institutes.

The DoPT circular

To defend their approach, FTII cited a 1998 Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT) circular. But that circular governs recruitment for government employment, not admissions in educational institutions. The circular states that "reserved-category candidates who qualify for a post on merit should be counted in the unreserved category".

Constitutional law researcher Shreya Shree of NLU Delhi told The Wire, “Applying this employment-based reasoning to higher education admissions is legally unsound. The logic of reservation in education is distinct from reservation in employment, and applying the wrong framework directly alters who has access to seats.”

What students are demanding

Students say the solution is straightforward and consistent with practices in most public examinations. They want full disclosure of written and interview marks, release of answer keys and scoring rubrics, anonymised evaluation procedures, and transparent application of reservation only after final ranking based on total marks. They also want a publicly documented seat allocation framework and a predictable, time-bound grievance redress mechanism. None of these demands, they note, are unusual or excessive; they reflect basic transparency standards already in place in some public exams like JEE, NEET, and UGC-NET.

Responding to questions, Sanjay Jaju, secretary in the Ministry of Information & Broadcasting, told The Wire: “Institutions must follow transparent and well-documented procedures. Human errors may occur, but systemic gaps identified now must be addressed institutionally.”

Note: This report has been edited since publication to offer greater clarity on the fact that FTII and SRFTI had separate exams.

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