This year, the board has decided that the rank cards will not be sent to the students by post. Instead, these can be downloaded directly from the board’s website. Although counselling for engineering programmes will start from June 26, the delay is causing inconvenience, as the students have no other way to access their rank cards.

“The rank card has the photograph and the signature of the candidate. We have to upload 45,000 rank cards of engineering and 1,800 rank cards of medical students. Since our websites are operating on a lesser bandwidth, we are taking longer than expected to upload the cards,” said Salil Kumar Sanyal, chairman, Central Selection Commitee of the Joint Entrance Examination Board.

According to sources in the board, the websites operate on a usual 256 kbps bandwidth throughout the year. However, it should have a larger bandwidth — a minimum of 2 mbps —- to handle the rank cards of so many students. Siddhartha Dutta, chairman of the JEE Board, however, said that the rank cards will be put on the websites soon.