45% engineering seats likely to go vacant in Gujarat’s colleges

 45% engineering seats likely to go vacant in Gujarat’s colleges

TIMES NEWS NETWORK

Ahmedabad:19.09.2020

The Admission Committee for Professional Courses (ACPC) today announced the provisional merit list for engineering courses according to which 27,261 candidates have been chosen. This will leave about 45% seats or about 22,791 seats vacant for the admission committee.

In all there are 64,782 seats this year of which ACPC is given the task to fill 50,051 seats. The remaining seats are to be filled by the self-financed colleges. In the provisional merit list, 23,483 candidates are from Gujarat Secondary and Higher Secondary Board, 3,390 are from CBSE, 256 are from ICSE, NIOS 87 and 45 are domicile candidates. This year, the total number of seats for engineering has reduced as compared to 73,345 engineering seats last year. As many as 6,000 seats have been reduced after closure of five self-financed colleges. In the case of government colleges, there is a reduction of 2,130 seats in faculties like EC, IC, power electronics, mining and production engineering.

Earlier this week, 900 new candidates were registered after ACPC extended the deadline for online registration for the third time. The final merit list is expected to be announced next week. The deadline was first extended from August 8 to August

28. It was later revisited and a new deadline of September 5 was given for registration. By then, as many as 29,000 students had registered online. The admission committee however decided to extend the deadline given the large number of vacant seats in engineering colleges. But only 900 fresh candidates have registered, leaving about half of the total engineering seats empty.

There are currently 66,128 seats available in degree engineering colleges.

Of these, 9,086 seats are of 16 government run colleges, 1,622 seats of four grantin aid colleges, 543 are of 2 engineering institutes run on PPP model, 29,134 are of 72 self-financed institutes (SFIs) affiliated with Gujarat Technological University and 24,013 are of 38 SFIs associated with private universities in the state. The remaining 204 seats are of an autonomous college.

The admission process for engineering and medical courses is expected to be completed only by November following which students will start attending college from December, according to sources. As a result, students are likely to be behind schedule by at least one semester in the new academic year, sources added.