The state government on Friday allowed engineering colleges to conduct counselling and select students for admission on their own as 30 per cent of the BTech seats are vacant.
A little over 11,000 of 34,000-odd engineering seats have remained vacant following a three-phased centralised counselling conducted by the state JEE Board, said an official of the education department.
Seats are mostly vacant in private engineering colleges, followed by the government engineering colleges.
An order issued by the department on Friday said the institutions were being asked to start the de-centralised counselling because “a reasonable number of seats in such professional technical courses are lying vacant”.
An official of the department said, even as the seats were filled up through the centralised counselling till mid-September, the vacancy started cropping up as the results of JEE-Main were announced in late September and counselling began for admission to NITs and IIEST, Shibpur.
“Over the past few years it has become a pattern that the engineering students of Bengal are preferring the NITs that are equipped with better infrastructure for pursuing BTech. They think that these central government-funded institutions provide a better scope of studying emerging disciplines like artificial intelligence, machine learning, leading to promising placement opportunities,” he said.
Taranjit Singh, the president of the Association of Professional Academic Institutions, a body that represents the self-financed engineering colleges in Bengal, said: “Although the vacancy figure has dropped compared to last year, seats have remained vacant in the core engineering discipline”.
Observing this trend, Malayendu Saha, the chairman of the JEE board, had appealed to BTech aspirants in June this year to study in colleges in Bengal more.
“Over the past few years, engineering aspirants were leaving the state to pursue engineering. We earnestly appeal to them that they fully utilise our infrastructure and resources,” he had said on June 24, while announcing that the state JEE exams would be held on July 17.
An official of the education department said the trend shows that the appeal has not been able to reverse the trend much.
“Students of a professional course will go to institutions that offer better job prospects,” he said.
According to him, the situation of vacancy in the BTech programmes at Jadavpur University and Calcutta University is much less alarming this year than what was last year.
Out of 1,253 BTech seats at Jadavpur University, 450 were vacant last year.
“Less than 50 seats are vacant this year,” the official said.