Pvt colleges not to get unfilled engg, med seats

From the next academic year, government quota medical, dental, and engineering seats that remain unfilled after two rounds of counselling will not be transferred to private college managements.

The State government has finally decided to stop offering government quota seats to college managements even if they remain unfilled after admission and casual rounds of counselling, on the ground that such seats are deliberately kept unoccupied, well-placed sources in the Higher Education department said. Chief Minister D V Sadananda Gowda has reportedly approved the proposal to cancel the transfer of government seats to college managements.

Many seats under the government quota are lapped up by college managements each year. It deprives many meritorious students from getting admission as the number of seats under the government quota sees a drop.

It is suspected that a lobby is behind the phenomenon in which seats under government quota are kept unfilled and later transferred to the management quota. Here is how it plays out: Middlemen, on behalf of private colleges, approach meritorious students who are likely to get seats in many top institutes through multiple entrance examinations or who do not want to study further. They offer the students to write the Common Entrance Test (CET) and secure top ranks. When students fulfill the promise, the middlemen ask them to attend counselling, pay the nominal fees, but not join the college. In return, they pay a few lakhs to the students. The seat thus blocked is transferred to the management quota. Later, it is sold for huge sums.

In order to call the bluff, the government is likely to remove a particular clause in the consensual agreement with the private college managements. The clause stipulates that government seats that remain unfilled after two rounds of seat selection process be transferred to the management quota. Private colleges, however, have already declared that they will oppose any move that expects them to give up their right on unfilled government seats.

Pandurang Shetty, Vice-President of the Karnataka Unaided Private Engineering Colleges’ Association, earlier told Deccan Herald that “we are not going to give up our right.

Unfilled seats under the government quota should be transferred to us. They can neither remain vacant nor given to diploma students under the lateral entry scheme.” Deccan Herald, however, has learnt that the government will not bother about such opposition.

Meanwhile, preparations are on for the CET scheduled for May 3 and 4. Nearly 1.22 lakh students will write the exam. The distribution of application forms and brochures to students is 90 per cent complete. The process will get over by Wednesday, KES sources said.

The online counselling will begin on July 15 and wind up in one-and-a-half-months. The nodal centres for the online counselling are being readied at 12 district headquarters.