Move to fill vacant seats at state institutes
The state allowed a one-time relaxation to conduct institute-level decentralised counselling to fill 21,000-odd seats and set a deadline to complete the process by Oct 31. State higher education minister Jagannath Chattopadhyay recently posted that 27,599 seats were filled following e-counselling and online decentralised counseling, 11,870 more than that last year. But still, around 21,000 BTech seats out of the total count of 48,683 remain vacant. An official at CU indicated that over 140 out of the 478 BTech seats remained vacant. At JU, around 140 of the total 1,190 BTech seats remain unfilled and the vacancies are across all departments except in computer science and electronics.
“We wrote to the govt long ago, requesting permission for decentralised spot counselling,” said JU VC Chiranjib Bhattacharjee. Calcutta University vice-chancellor Asutosh Ghosh said: “I welcome this move. For the first time, after three rounds of online counselling, the West Bengal Joint Entrance Examination (WBJEE) Board held even the counselling for the decentralised rounds online, on the decentralised counselling admission portal (DCAP) for undergraduate courses in engineering, technology, pharmacy and architecture. The official notice issued by the higher education department asked all the institutes to publish course-wise seat vacancy details, eligibility criteria, admission procedures and their schedule on respective websites and media platforms for prospective applicants. Additionally, institutes were to submit their vacancy notifications to both the higher education department and the WBJEE Board. Engineering institutes across the state welcomed the decision. Vice-chancellors of at least two state-run universities—Jadavpur University (JU) and Calcutta University (CU)—had written to the higher education department, requesting permission to conduct traditional offline decentralised counseling to fill vacant BTech seats. “Had we conducted the counselling ourselves, we could have started classes for all early. Now it’s Oct and classes will practically begin in Nov. It’s an inordinate delay. Classes have already started at the IITs and NITs and their first mid-semesters are over. Their second mid-semesters will probably be over soon, too, and they will appear for their end-semester exams in Nov. It’s creating a huge backlog. This is not at all desirable. Anyway, it’s good that permission has been granted. Every year, a few seats remain vacant after e-counselling, which are usually filled through a decentralised process. This time, too, the process will allow us to make a final attempt at filling those remaining seats. Vacancies were in most departments other than the computer science and engineering, including electrical engineering and electronics engineering.
Kolkata: The state higher education department on Tuesday permitted decentralised counselling—it could be online or offline—for BTech, pharmacy and architecture seats, which are still vacant, at govt institutes.