Mita Mukherjee
With more than 10,000 out of nearly 34,000 seats in West Bengal’s BTech courses remaining vacant after completion of three-phased centralised counselling, the state government on Friday asked individual engineering institutes to fill the vacant seats on their own.
The centralised counseling conducted by the state joint entrance examination board had ended in September.
The counselling was held for distribution of seats in the state’s 110 private and state-aided engineering institutes to students who figured in the merit list of the West Bengal Joint Entrance Examination (WBJEE) conducted by it for admitting students in the undergraduate engineering courses in the state held in July this year.
Like the previous years, the bulk of the vacant seats are in the private colleges many of which are located in the districts, lack required infrastructure and do not have adequate numbers of qualified teachers.
Malayanedu Saha, chairman of the West Bengal Joint Entrance Examination Board said the admission trends at several engineering colleges were better this time than last year as more students had taken the berths.
Last year, more than 12,500 BTech seats were vacant after the centralised counselling when the government had asked the engineering institutes to fill the vacant seats on their own.
Saha welcomed the state government’s decision allowing the engineering institutes to fill the seats through de-centralised counselling.
“Many students have the ability to become an engineer but they are not able to perform well in the entrance exam for several reasons. Many such students will now benefit by taking the vacant seats through the de-centralised counselling,” Saha told EducationWorld.
However, veteran teachers of engineering colleges in Kolkata said the government should ensure that only deserving students are allowed to take the vacant seats.
With shrinking opportunities for fresh engineering graduates in the job market, the demand for engineering education in Bengal has been declining and vacant seats have been a problem with a number of engineering institutes in the state for the past few years.
Last year several seats in premiere state institutes like Jadavpur University too were vacant after the government had completed centralized counseling.
The order issued by the higher education department on Friday said the institutions were being asked to start the de-centralised counseling as “ a reasonable number of seats in such professional technical courses is lying vacant, it has been decided by the State Govt. in the Higher Education Department to allow all the participating institutions (participated in the e-counselling process in 2021-22 conducted by the WBJEEB) for admission of students through de-centralised counseling and allotment process in strict compliance with the norms and guidelines” of the government.