JOIN USFor the first time in the country, the State has adopted the online counselling for diploma courses, which has facilitated talented students obtain seats in government quota as well as ensuring early start of classes in the colleges.
This is all thanks to the two young software engineer brothers, Ravi H Talwar and Srikanth H Talwar of Koppal, who have provided the software, which has been developed to ease the online diploma admission of 2013-14 procedure.
Having faced the hassle of the diploma admission counselling as students few years ago during their diploma courses, which had deprived them of having choices of colleges, the duo wanted to contribute a system to benefit students particulary the meritorious.
Meanwhile, to conduct the process in a more efficient, reliable and transparent manner and to help meritorious students, the State Directorate of Technical Education came up with the idea of making the process online. The request was made to the reputed software company Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) early last year. However, it failed to complete the project within the deadline given by the government. Ravi, CEO and Managing Director and Shrikanth, Director of SHLR Technosoft Pvt Ltd, were approached in the last moment to develop the software for the counselling of 2012-13. Then, the process had been conducted offline, which slightly varied from the previous admission system.
Even this procedure delayed the admissions to colleges, and students were forced to choose from five or six polytechnic colleges attached to the nodal center.
This in turn affected the academic schedule of the colleges which used to start the classes from September. This year, the colleges have started classes from July first week.
This time as the process has become fully online, after Higher Education Minister R V Deshpande expressed completion of admission process by July 31. Thanks to the initiative, students this year submitted only one application and chose from the list of colleges across the State. Earlier the students had to apply to each regional center separately.
The company began the process of counselling with seat allotment for special category on June 13 in 11 nodal centres, while the applications were received in 45 centres to facilitate rural students.
The first phase is nearing completion, while there are three other phases to be completed, which include conversion of rural unclaimed seats into urban ones, and furthering of open round and casual round.
Ravi told Deccan Herald that the system was beneficial to rural and meritorious students mainly, not restricting their selection procedure to a few colleges. “The problems my brother and I faced during admissions for diploma inspired us to develop the software,” he added.
Ravi is an MTech graduate from R V College of Engineering, Bangalore with specialisation in VLSI and Embedded system, while Shrikanth is pursuing M Sc (Engineering in Computer Science and engineering) at Indian Institute of Science (IISc).