New Delhi: In a fallout of the stay imposed on the 27% OBC quota by the Supreme Court’s, IIM Bangalore has frozen the admission process for the academic year June 2007.

The institute says that there will be no final list of selected candidates till it gets the HRD Ministry's instructions on quotas.

IIM-B is hoping the the decision comes in the next three or four days so that they can make up for the delay in the admission process.

Call letters to those who have been selected in the premier institute are usually sent out by April 12, and IIM-B is hoping that they can go by April 15.

At a press conference on Thursday, IIM Director Bakul Dholakia said, "We received a letter from the HRD Ministry which advised that we should not admit any students for the course till further orders and we have thus decided to to defer the admission process."

However, he added that the admission process would not be deferred beyond April 21.

"The list that would be released would be according to the capacity of those admitted last year," he said.

Meanwhile, IIM-Kolkata has also taken a decision to hold back admission process till further notice.

The IIMs had already finalised the list of candidates for admission in June 2007. Over 1,000 candidates were called for interviews based on the seven per cent OBC reservation at IIM-B for this year.

To accommodate the OBC quota, IIM-B planned to increase the number of seats in the coming academic year from 240 to 270.

Two weeks ago, IIM-Ahmedabad had said that the it would not implement the 27 per cent OBC reservation in the 2007-2008 academic year, if the Supreme Court stay is not vacated by the 12th of April.

The Board of Governors of IIM-Ahmedabad had to decide whether they would go by the Supreme Court order or by the directions of HRD ministry and they chose to follow the apex court.

Dholakia had then said, "If there is not alteration of SC order then the admission process will not be any different from last year's."

The Human Resources Development Ministry had asked all Central Government-funded educational institutions to put admissions on hold till the legal wrangle over the quota was sorted out.

The court has said the Government must first provide it with data on the number of OBCs in the country before it implements the reservation order.