Kolkata: More than one third of the total seats in the engineering colleges across the state are remained vacant even after the end of the third round of centralised online counseling conducted by West Bengal Joint Entrance Examinations Board. According to sources in the board, 11,933 of the 33,000 odd seats that was made available for counselling have been lying vacant.
The state Higher Education department has already directed the universities and the institutions to carry out decentralized counselling to fill up the vacant seats.
Jadavpur University will conduct counselling on August 12 and 14 to for the 200 odd engineering seats remaining vacant after the centralized counseling of the board. Out of 1,243 engineering seats at JU in 16 departments 197 seats have not been occupied as yet. JU has reserved 533 of its 594 BTech seats in the general category for students domiciled in Bengal this year.
"The third round of centralised counselling ended on July 20 and the vacant seat count is expected to cross 200 after the ongoing admission season ends on August 6," a JU professor said.
Calcutta University has decided to hold the first phase of decentralised counselling on August 5 for the 50 seats in the four-year BTech programme that were left vacant after centralised counselling.
"The entire admission process in engineering is completed by October. It is too early to comment whether the admission trend is impressive or not at this juncture," said a senior official of Maulana Abul Kalam Azad Institute of Technology (Makaut) .
Makaut presently has around 90 engineering colleges and 110 professional colleges across the state affiliated to it.
"More than 30,000 students are graduating every year from Makaut and we are taking all possible measures to make our students employable. Steps are being taken to ensure that the research works are business oriented and not limited to patents only," the official added.
A member of the state Higher Education Council who refused to be named said that the university had lost a number of BTech aspirants to some of the newer IITs and the NITs. The state Joint Entrance Examination was held much later than similar examinations in other states and results were published much later. So a number of students from Bengal had already taken admission in engineering institutes at other states," the official said.