There’s a huge demand for medical and engineering courses in the State but hardly any takers for undergraduate courses in pharmacy, physiotherapy and nursing. This in spite of the fact that there are good number of government seats available in these courses at comparatively lower fee rates.

With the counselling process for nursing, pharmacy and physiotherapy scheduled to commence in September third week, the response for government seats has been poor. With the last date to apply closing on August 25, the number of applications for BSc (Nursing) and BPT (Bachelor of Physiotherapy) barely fill up 50 per cent of seats. The response to BPharm (pharmacy), however, is relatively better.
This year, there are 3,000 government seats earmarked for nursing, for which about 1,148 applications have been received — 38 per cent of the total allocated seats. The worst affected is the physiotherapy branch with only 42 applications for 441 seats. Even if all the applicants select seats, an alarming 91.5 per cent seats will still remain vacant.

The pharmacy course has evoked relatively good response, 480 applications for 827 seats and for the second year BPharm, a total of 277 applications have been submitted as against the available for 127 seats.

The situation is no different from last year, where the number of government seats available for the nursing course was 5,588, of which only 897 seats were filled. In physiotherapy only 43 seats were filled out of 688 available seats, while for the first year pharmacy course, only 385 seats out of 1,223 were allotted.

Unfilled seats
The unfilled seats forced the government to reduce the seats in these courses by 10 per cent this year. Last year, the seat matrix was 30:70, with 30 per cent being government seats and 70 per cent private management seats. This year, the seat ratio has been fixed as 20: 80, where 20 per cent are government seats.
However, the government is concerned about counselling. “Though, we have received some applications, we doubt whether all the applicants will turn up for counselling as the selection process for other professional courses is on,"  Vasantha Kumar, registrar, Rajiv Gandhi University of Health Sciences (RGUHS) told Deccan Herald.

Vacant seats
He suggested that these vacant seats could be allotted to non-Karnataka students. Further, he said that North Indian students were more interested in physiotherapy than students in Karnataka. “We are yet to find out the reason for lack of response from the students of Karnataka. May be, these courses are not projected properly here.  Educating the students about job opportunities available in these courses should help,” he added.