Hyderabad: The Telangana high court dismissed a writ petition challenging IIM Mumbai’s admission process for its 2026-28 MBA programme.Delivering the judgment recently, Justice Nagesh Bheemapaka ruled that the petitioner failed to prove any violation of his legal rights. The court noted that the petitioner sought to convert a highly competitive selection process into a matter of personal right based on his overall score, while ignoring the mandatory sectional requirements of the admission policy.The petitioner, 24, from Gundla Pochampally near Hyderabad, secured 99.52 overall percentile in CAT-2025 and moved the court after being excluded from the interview stage. He contended that his high scores should have entitled him to an interview call and alleged that the authorities were arbitrary in their selection. He also questioned why the institute failed to respond to his emails seeking clarification on his status.In its response, IIM Mumbai clarified that merely clearing the minimum threshold did not guarantee a spot in the next stage of the selection process. The institute said that due to the high volume of applications, it raised the sectional cut-off for the Data Interpretation & Logical Reasoning (DI&LR) section to 93.50 percentile.As the petitioner secured 92.87 percentile in that section, he fell short of the required benchmark. The institute also said that other candidates the petitioner compared himself to cleared the revised sectional cut-offs, making his claims of discrimination factually incorrect.‘Courts should not interfere with admission standards’The court observed that academic bodies have the exclusive authority to fix admission criteria, and courts should not interfere with these standards unless they are proven to be mala fide or illegal. It noted that large-scale admission processes do not place a legal obligation on institutions to engage in individual correspondence with every unsuccessful candidate. The court added that the institute’s decision was based on objective criteria applied uniformly to all applicants, ensuring a fair and transparent process.Finding the selection process free from arbitrariness, the court upheld the institute’s policy and dismissed the petition, confirming that the petitioner had no enforceable right to demand a seat in the interview process.
