Admission to Btech: Private tech colleges go for the kill

Deepkamal Kaur

Tribune News Service

Jalandhar, August 6

Even though it has been nearly four months since various private universities have been conducting admission to B.Tech, the Technical Education Department was yet to issue a notification for admission to the affiliated state engineering and management colleges of Punjab.

The private universities have been holding admissions since April this year. Even some private colleges have been doing provisional admissions. But all government engineering colleges and the five universities which are awaiting the government notification are stuck up and apprehend that they might lose out badly on students, who have already started taking admission in private colleges owing to the delay.

The five universities which are to participate in the centralised counselling, including IKG Punjab Technical University, Kapurthala; Maharaja Ranjit Singh Punjab Technical University, Bathinda; Shaheed Bhagat Singh University, Faridkot; Beant University, Gurdaspur; and Punjab Agricultural University, Ludhiana. The university officials said they were still in dark as to which university will hold the centralised counselling.

Owners of the private colleges said in such a scenario, they had no option but to hold provisional admission and keep the students intact. “We had to start pre-registration so that the students do not move on towards the private universities. There already are lots of issues in ensuring fulfilling of the seats”, he said.

Anurag Verma, Principal Secretary, Technical Education, however, clarified all issues, “The counselling will surely be conducted by IKGPTU as it has all the systems in place. We are in the process of sorting out all details. We will most likely issue the notification by Monday or Tuesday. The delay occurred because the AICTE had revised its admission calendar. In our admission plan, we will give the institutes a time of two to 2.5 months to conduct the admission. Like the previous year, admission this year too will be conducted on the basis of the Class XII results and not the JEE.”