Mumbai: Two students from Maharashtra were among the 26 top scorers in the country in the JEE (Main) results announced on Monday. Seventeen-year-old Madhav Viradiya, who is originally from Vadodara but studied in Mumbai for the past two years, and Siddharth Athaley, 18, from Pune both secured a perfect 100 percentile across the two JEE (Main) sessions combined.Over 10 lakh students appeared for the second session held in April. Across both sessions, 15.4 lakh unique students took the first-level qualifying test for admission to the IITs. Of these, 2.5 lakh qualified for JEE (Advanced), with the general category cut-off percentile at 93.412. After scoring 291 out of 300 in the first session, Mumbai’s Viradiya chose to appear for the second one as well, aiming for a perfect 100 in all three subjects. While he achieved full marks in physics and chemistry, three incorrect answers in mathematics brought his second-session score down to 285. For the combined rankings, however, his higher score from the first session was taken into account, Viradiya, who is from Narayana e-Techno School, Andheri, told TOI. Of the 26 toppers, his national rank stands at 17.Like most IIT aspirants, Viradiya, too, is now focused on his JEE (Advanced) preparation. Though he has his eyes set on a computer science and engineering seat at IIT-Bombay, he also plans to explore his interests in physics and astronomy alongside.Viradiya’s father is an engineer, and elder brother is also pursuing metallurgical engineering at IIT-Jodhpur.For Pune’s Siddharth Athaley, too, engineering was an obvious choice, as he comes from a family of engineers, with both his parents and elder sister in the profession. Athaley, from Lokseva e-School and Junior College in Pune, took the test in both sessions and managed to improve his score. In the first session, he scored a 99.986th percentile and went on to bag a perfect 100 in the second session in April. His overall rank stands at 25. While Athaley’s parents are in civil (father) and electronics (mother) engineering, he said he has not given much thought to engineering branch and institute and is focussed on JEE (Advanced) preparation. His sister is an IIT-Bombay pass-out from the 2023 batch. In his free time, he plays cricket and enjoys playing the keyboard.
