Andhra rains hit DU admissions as first cut-off ends with 37% applications approved

New delhi: Torrential rains in the southern part of India hit the Delhi University's servers in Hyderabad on Wednesday, causing the varsity's admissions portal to crash for a while and resulting in confusion among applicants as admissions to courses under the first cut-off list ended with 37.14 per cent applications having been approved.

Of the 59,730 applications received from Monday to Wednesday, 22,186 were approved and 11,248 aspirants have paid the fees. Over 3.4 lakh had applied to the varsity, which is offering 70,000 seats this year.

While the Delhi University Students' Union met with the Dean of Examination over the issue and other grievances related to the digital admissions process this session, the administration maintained that there "was no major technical glitch".

Speaking to Millennium Post, Shobha Bagai, Dean of Admissions for Delhi University said, "There was not a crash perse. What I have been made to understand is there are servers in different parts of the country. The only server based in Hyderabad had issues because there has been lots of rain and everything was down and the whole load was shifted to the Jaipur server, which was linked to our DU server. The Hyderabad applicants were facing an issue, which I have been told was resolved till evening," she said.

DUSU in their statement said that multiple queries of the students were brought up by DUSU and discussed in the meeting including the website crashes in the past two days, rejection of the caste and PWD certificates by the colleges due to the non-renewal among other things.

Meanwhile, offline help-desks have also been installed at the North Campus to address the admission-related queries of students visiting the campus in a timely and effective manner.

As for the admissions under the first cut-off, Shri Ram College of Commerce (SRCC) principal Simrit Kaur said the college has had 125 admissions under the BA (Honours) Economics and 121 under BCom (Honours). The college had announced a cut-off of 99.50 per cent for BCom (Honours) and 99 per cent for BA (Honours) Economics.

Lady Shri Ram College for Women said their data would be ready only on Thursday. Three of the college's courses had a cut-off of 100 per cent - this highest this year.

LSR principal Suman Sharma said, "We have to be very careful in analysing documents. In one of the subjects we might have exceeded the number of seats while in another course, we have admitted the optimum number of students. The cutoffs for the second list will see a marginal decline and that marginal decline has to be decided."

This year, the admission process has gone entirely online owing to the coronavirus pandemic. Anju Srivastava, principal of Hindu College, said the data is still under process.