Ten days after the beginning of CET counselling for engineering seats, parents of general-category students who eye the much-sought-after courses are left with two options -- pay through your nose or see your dear ones ‘exiled’ to border districts.

Reason: All the free seats for prominent courses in almost all the important colleges of Bangalore and surrounding districts have been filled.

Now, the free seats for such courses are available only in backward and border districts. The students have only two choices: either pack themselves off to the backward/border districts, or go for the management quota, paying a hefty annual fee plus donations to some private colleges.

According to sources, no seats for Electronics and Communication (E&C) and Computer Science (CS) are left in the University Visvesvaraiah College of Engineering at Bangalore. For students from general merit category, seats for Mechanical Engineering (ME), Electrical Engineering (EE) and Information Science (IS) in this college are filled.

Similar is the situation in Sri Krishna Rajendra Silver Jubilee Technological Institute, where no seats are left for E&C, CS, IS, ME, EE and IS. At Dr Ambedkar Institute of Technology, free-seats for E&C have already been filled.

And as of 4 pm on Friday, there were only four seats left for CS, which are reserved for the Scheduled Castes. There are only four seats left for IS, that too are reserved for SCs.

Thus, in many City colleges, either no seats are left for E&C, CS and IS and those few still vacant are earmarked for socio-economically weaker sections. A similar picture obtains in colleges of Tumkur, Mysore, Mangalore and Hassan.

There were only a few Bangalore colleges where there were vacancies but students and their parents say the reputation of these are such as to make studying there ‘undesirable’.

‘Borderline’ cases

A few seats for prominent courses like E&C, CS, IS, EE, Biotechnology are still to be filled in colleges located in border districts, which are backward as well.

For instance, in RTE Rural Engineering College, Hulkoti, 26 seats are left for E&T, 21 for CS and 17 for EE. This college has some seats left for general category students also.

Similarly, in Sreemathi Leeladharan Nair College of Engineering at Raichur there were a few seats left for the general category to pursue the most-sought-after courses. In KCTEC, Gulbarga, 19 seats were left for E&C, 18 for CS and 19 seats for ME.

To sum up, in 10 days, the most brilliant and luckiest students secured seats in the creamiest of colleges in the state, leaving others to explore the harder options.

The only choice left to parents is to hurry now for management seats. Chidananda Sathyamurthy from Tumkur, who wants his son to be an electronic engineer, says he will now have to arrange money for his son to study in an ‘important’ college. 

“I’ve to arrange at least Rs 2 lakh immediately - Rs 1 lakh as donation and Rs. 50,000 to Rs 60,000 as tuition fee. Another 50,000 I may have to spend on his stay, books and computer at home,” says he.