More than one in four candidates skipped the Joint Entrance Examination Main held this month amid the pandemic, which is more than four times the absenteeism figure usually witnessed, official data show.

The JEE Main was held from September 1 to 6 amid criticism of the move from many students, parents, teachers and others who argued that it endangered the health of the candidates.

According to figures tweeted by education minister Ramesh Pokhriyal, about 8.58 lakh candidates had applied for the exam but only 6.35 lakh — 74 per cent — turned up.

Data with the National Testing Agency (NTA), which began conducting the JEE Main from 2019, show that 929,198 candidates had registered for the exam in January 2019 while 874,469, or 94.11 per cent, actually took it.

In April 2019, there were 935,755 candidates of whom 881,096, or 94.15 per cent, appeared. The absenteeism in the January 2020 exam too was about 6 per cent, which means the 26 per cent absenteeism in September is more than fourfold the figure seen in the past three editions of the twice-a-year exam.

Going by absolute numbers, 2.23 lakh students dropped out this time compared with figures between 50,000 and 55,000 in recent editions.

After the JEE Main ended on Sunday, neither the NTA nor the education ministry had released the turnout figures.

On Wednesday, BJP leader Subramanian Swamy — who had opposed the exams being held in the middle of the Covid-19 outbreak — tweeted that “out of 18 lakh (candidates) who downloaded passes, 8 lakh turned up to take the exam”.

Pokhriyal then released the figures of 8.58 lakh and 6.35 lakh late on Wednesday evening.

On Thursday, Swamy contested the figure of 8.58 lakh candidates, highlighting that the ministry had furnished a figure of 9.53 lakh registered candidates before the Supreme Court.

Pokhriyal again clarified that 9.53 lakh was the number of total registrations but since 95,000 candidates had applied for both the BTech and architecture-and-planning papers, the actual number of candidates was 8.58 lakh.

The JEE Main is held twice a year so that students who appeared in January can take the test in April again to improve their scores.

A government official suggested that most of the absentees would be candidates from January. The April exam had been deferred because of the countrywide lockdown. He conceded that this was only a conjecture.