AICTE cuts State engg intake

CET, COMEDK counselling likely to be delayed

Besides leading to uncertainty on when the counselling session will begin, the AICTE’s sudden decision to truncate the seats by a fairly big margin, will certainly create confusion among the student community in the State. Several attempts to contact AICTE officials in Delhi, including officiating chairman S S Mantha, failed.

Top sources in the State Higher Education Department told Deccan Herald  that three days before the CET counselling was to commence, the AICTE had displayed on its website (which can be accessed by respective colleges using their user IDs and passwords) that the total number of approved seats was only about 59,000 instead of over 69,000 which was the figure last year.

Expressing concern, Higher Education Department sources agreed that the AICTE decision would have a cascading effect on the entire counselling process.

More delay

According to previous year’s seat matrix, 36,524 seats were under the CET with the rest for COMEDK and management quota. The CET alone has given nearly 71,000 rakings for the year 2010-11. It now appears that the CET counselling session, which was to begin on July 7 after the AICTE made it clear that it was yet to give its approval to 167 colleges across the State, will be deferred by a few more days.

Sources said the reduced number of seats for various engineering colleges across the State was on account of a series of “anomalies” which, among other things, include simple “goof ups” like not providing a college with a stream of speciality which was available since the institution’s inception.

To complicate matters, the number of colleges with AICTE recognition have also come down. With uncertainty and confusion looming large, the state government is dilly-dallying over holding the CET counselling according to schedule (July 7). “We are prepared to go ahead with the counselling process as per schedule, but students will be in a fix over which college will provide them engineering courses of their choice,” an official said.

While AICTE has intimated the approved list of seats, officials at the Higher Education Department and the Karnataka Examination Authority (KEA) are hopeful that the “missing” seats will be included later when the revised time table for the casual vacancy round counselling begins when ever the dates are announced.

The fiasco forced the Directorate of Technical Education (DTE) to submit a report to the state government on Friday. The report will be examined by the Higher Education Department before appropriate steps are taken to address the question why AICTE went ahead to cut down the number of seats.

Amid the prevailing uncertainty, RV Group of Institutions president Panduranga Shetti met the Higher Education Minister Arvind Limbavali urging him to defer the CET counselling session. Shetti said his meeting with Limbavali was fruitful and that the minister had agreed to push the counselling session to a later date.

Seat debacle

* Number of seats approved for the year 2009-10 by AICTE: 69,000

* Number of seats approved as of July 2 by AICTE: 59,000

*Ranking under CET: 71,000

*Ranking under COMEDK: 2,000

(*approximate figures as given by Higher Education Department officials)