Of the 14.7 lakh students who appeared for the Joint Entrance Exam (JEE) in 2025 for admission into India’s top engineering colleges, 17.6% cleared the test, according to the JEE-Main results announced last week. In contrast, 86.7% of the engineering aspirants coached under a programme by Avanti Fellows – an organisation supported by the Godrej Foundation – passed the same JEE-Main exam.
The JEE is one of the most competitive exams conducted in India, required for admission into major central government-funded engineering colleges. These include the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT), National Institutes of Technology (NIT), and Indian Institutes of Information Technology (IIIT). There are 23 IITs across India, with just 17,740 highly-coveted seats.
Avanti Fellows, founded as a non-profit organisation 10 years ago, aims to provide academically-gifted, economically-disadvantaged students equitable opportunities to build careers in fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). Through its various programmes in schools and online, Avanti coaches high school students, free of cost, for JEE and NEET (National Eligibility cum Entrance Test, required for admission into medical colleges.
One of Avanti’s most intensive programmes involves running special Centres of Excellence (CoE) in a number of Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalayas (JNVs). Established by the central government in every Indian district, JNVs are residential schools for high-achieving students from Class 6 to 12. Avanti has set up Centres of Excellence in six JNVs across India, with its own teachers conducting all classes and providing specialised coaching for students of Class 11 and 12 in the science stream.
In the four years since it began the CoE programme, Avanti’s students have consistently excelled in the JEE-Main exam: their pass percentage was 94.4% in 2022, 100% in 2023, 93.1% in 2024 and 86.7% in 2025. Of the 59 CoE students who passed the JEE in 2024, 15 went on to get admission into various IITs, while 14 got into NITs.
Avanti Fellows also runs a “Nodal” classes programme that involves after-school coaching for students in 16 JNVs. These students, too, performed better at the JEE-Main exam this year than the national average, with a pass percentage of 43.1%.
