Clueless on number of seats, state stalls tech admissions

Updated on: Friday, July 23, 2010

Maharashtra has stalled admissions to its professional courses- engineering and MBA-as it does not have accurate information on the number of seats in its colleges. In several cases, information that local colleges fed into the database and records from the All India Council for Technical Education-the apex regulatory body-is conflicting.

Take for instance Aditya College of MBA, Beed, which listed pharmacy and civil engineering as some of its courses, even though they only offer management. "We have postponed admissions because we are clueless about the total number of seats in the state. We need clarity on the new colleges that the AICTE has approved, as well as existing colleges that had approached the council to increase their seat intake or start new streams. We hope to start admissions by next week,'' said S K Mahajan, director of the Directorate of Technical Education (DTE).

The state was to commence engineering admissions last week, while the process for MBA had started. However, both have been postponed. The problem, said a source, stemmed from the day private colleges were asked to feed in their own information into a central system. "After the leadership changed in the AICTE, the council eased several norms. It did not visit any college that wanted to expand its capacity, but merely asked them for details on the infrastructure and faculty. Later, the colleges were expected to update the total seats. But several institutes did not provide the correct information.''

This year, though the AICTE gave the nod to 116 professional colleges across Maharashtra to start operations, merely 50 institutes have, to date, received their letters of approval from the council. "Some may not even get the permission as the executive council of the AICTE that met recently did not give a green signal for many new colleges,'' said the source. "There is also no clarity on the engineering colleges that had applied for a second shift and wanted to run a polytechnic on the same premises,'' the source added. Till last year, the AICTE and DTE used to compile the database.

Clueless on number of seats, state stalls tech admissions

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