Admission portal shut, several colleges stare at empty seats

Kolkata: A number of seats in several city colleges are still vacant with the admission portal getting closed from Friday. The state Higher Education department had allowed the colleges and unitary universities to reopen their admission portals from October 1 to 8 in the wake of several seats remaining vacant in the Under-Graduate level. The colleges have been able to fill up some of the vacant seats after extension but still, a good number of them are empty.

Scottish Church College has 145 of its seats vacant against its total capacity of 802.

"The bulk of these vacant seats is in Sanskrit where only one of the 50 seats has found a taker. Even in some Science-based subjects there have been vacant seats this year. Chemistry has 10 vacant seats which is quite unusual," Madhumanjari Mandal, principal of Scottish Church College said.

The subjects in which all the seats have been filled are Computer Science, Zoology, BBA, Microbiology and English.

At least 600 out of 2,700 odd seats in Asutosh College in South Kolkata's Hazra are still vacant with the majority of vacancies existing in Philosophy, Sanskrit and Electronics.

"There were 750 odd vacancies till September 30 and currently, there are 600. So around, 150 seats have been filled up in this span of time," a senior official of Asutosh College said.

Surendranath College in central Kolkata that had nearly 50 percent of its 2,400-odd seats unoccupied till September, has been able to fill up 600 more seats. However, still 30 percent of the seats are lying vacant. "Interestingly, seats in some Science subjects too have not been occupied. In case of other subjects, the trend has remained the same with seats in Sanskrit, Economics, Political Science and Philosophy not being filled up," Indranil Kar, principal of Surendranath College, said.

Principal of Maulana Azad College Subhasis Dutta said that majority of the college's 1,032 seats have been filled up.

"The problem is a good number of students have taken admission in two, three colleges at a time and have not cancelled admission. This has resulted in deprivation of a number of deserving students, which is unfortunate," Dutta added.

Lady Brabourne College principal Siuli Sarkar is also not happy even with the majority of seats getting filled up.

"Students will still migrate to unitary universities or will go for top national level institutions and the number of unoccupied seats will go up," she added.