Calcutta University has decided to introduce an 80 per cent domicile quota for admission of general category students to its four-year BTech courses from the 2024-25 academic session.
Only those candidates will be treated as domicile of Bengal who have either been residing in the state continuously for at least 10 years as of December 31, 2023, or whose parents are permanent residents of the state with a permanent address in the state, said a CU official.
The decision was approved at Tuesday’s meeting of CU’s engineering and technology faculty council.
Until 2023, the engineering seats for general category students in the state-funded CU were open for students from all states.
Jadavpur University had in 2019 introduced a domicile policy reserving 90 per
cent of BTech seats for “home students”.
The CU faculty council has also decided that all 400-odd BTech seats would be in the four-year programme.
Currently, of the 400-odd seats, 253 are in the four-year programme and the rest in the three-year one.
Debotosh Guha, the dean of the engineering and technology faculty at CU, told Metro: “The faculty council has decided on the domicile policy. Eighty per cent of the seats will be reserved. But the decision has to be approved by the syndicate.”
A CU official said the domicile clause would be applied while admitting students through centralised online counselling.
The rationale for the reservation was that students from Bengal were being outnumbered by candidates from other states in the courses.
The same concern had prompted JU to introduce the domicile policy in the engineering courses.
Anil Sahasrabudhe, the former chairman of the All India Council of Technical Education, had told this newspaper in July 2019 that JU should not have implemented the domicile quota and “shut the door on brilliant students from outside Bengal”.
A CU official said some professors had echoed Sahasrabudhe’s views. “But the majority in the faculty council was in favour of the policy.”
Sankhayan Choudhury, CU’s head of the computer science and engineering department who attended Tuesday’s meeting, said: “I don’t think the university will compromise on quality because of this. Rather the policy will help us draw brilliant students from within Bengal.”
Explaining what prompted the university to opt for the four-year BTech for all seats, dean Guha said: “We are not getting enough students for the three-year programme. So the faculty council decided to merge all seats with the four-year programme. Some additional BTech seats will be created for science graduates.”
Only science graduates are eligible for the three-year course, while the four-year programme, which was launched in 2015, takes in students through the state JEE.