Premier tag for JU but record engg seats empty

  • | Friday | 13th July, 2018

As many as 254 seats in the blue-chip engineering faculty are still vacant with the third round of counselling over. In the end, only 4 seats were empty in the engineering faculty. But even that will leave more than 100 seats vacant, forcing the institute to compromise on quality and open up for aspirants with poor score on general merit list. Last year, there were only 150 seats vacant after the third round of counselling. “This is the first time we have so many unfilled seats in engineering after the third round of counselling,” a senior JU official said.

KOLKATA: The Jadavpur University campus finally got some good news on Thursday, after a fortnight-long stand-off over Arts faculty admissions, but it was tinged with a piece of bad news.The good news first: JU became one of the two from Bengal and five across the nation to be recommended for the Institutions of Eminence status, a senior UGC official said. This means it is now in line to be part of an elite group of 20 institutes that will get complete academic and administrative autonomy. IIT-Kharagpur was the other institute based in Bengal that was on Thursday’s short-list. Six institutes have already got this tag.But the good news was tinged with some bad news, which university officials said was a “direct fallout” of the fortnight-long campus stand-off. As many as 254 seats in the blue-chip engineering faculty are still vacant with the third round of counselling over. “This is the first time we have so many unfilled seats in engineering after the third round of counselling,” a senior JU official said. Students had to take admission between July 3 and July 7, when the admission row peaked on the campus, but 254 seats remained vacant after that.Even as the Arts faculty at Jadavpur University gears up for admission tests, the engineering faculty is faced with the unprecedented vacancy in the department after the third round of counselling. A section of the engineering faculty believes students’ protests over the university decision to withdraw admission tests to six departments in Humanities before they were reinstated may have contributed to the poor show in engineering.With just one round to go, 254 seats are yet to be filled up. Last year, there were only 150 seats vacant after the third round of counselling. In the end, only 4 seats were empty in the engineering faculty. But this year, it is starkly different.Maximum number of vacancies are in civil and mechanical engineering. Even Computer Science that usually gets filled up first has 10 vacancies still. Electronics and Telecommunication engineering has as many as 17 vacancies.Post counselling, selected engineering students were required to be present on the campus for physical admission between July 3 and July 7 with the admission allotment letter from the West Bengal Joint Entrance Examination Board. That is when the student movement gained pitch at JU, scaring off parents, who chose other institutes for their children.“On July 3, the admission committee meeting was held where no decision could be taken over the Arts faculty admission. Thereafter on July 4 the executive council met and scrapped the earlier decision to hold admissions on 50-50 basis, giving equal weightage to written tests and Plus-2 marks. It was from that day that the students’ agitation peaked. On July 5, another admission committee meeting was held and from July 6, the hunger strike began,” recounted a JU teacher.Another engineering faculty member said he was aware of students who had opted out of JU and taken admissions in institutes like National Institute of Technology-Silchar and NITAgartala that rank below JU on the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF).“Perception about JU has been on a downhill due to student unrest and it has slid further with the agitation happening during the admission season,” he said.During the final round of counselling, the engineering department expects at least 150 more seats to be filled up. But even that will leave more than 100 seats vacant, forcing the institute to compromise on quality and open up for aspirants with poor score on general merit list. Partha Pratim Biswas, teacher of construction engineering at JU, felt that those who had migrated could have done so to study basic science or engineering science. “Perception changes over time. The kind of appreciation JU has received is much more than recent negative publicity,” he said.

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