Calcutta University is conducting an assessment on how many students are attending first-year BTech classes to determine the count of seats for which the university has to hold the second phase of counselling.
A CU official said 30 seats have fallen vacant days after Jadavpur University conducted its own independent counselling in late November to fill its own 261 vacant BTech seats.
CU is calling up students to find out if they have discontinued pursuing the BTech programme at CU. So far 30 students have confirmed their discontinuance.
A notice on the second phase of the decentralised counselling from next week will soon be issued, the official said.
On November 17 and 18, CU conducted the first phase of its independent counselling after 55 out of the 252 BTech seats remained vacant following centralised counselling by the JEE board.
“Since Jadavpur University conducted counselling for such a massive number of seats we were fearing that students who enrolled at CU after the centralised counselling would switch to its city rival. The attendance started thinning at the CU tech campus after JU’s four-day counselling ended on November 26,” said a CU official.
The assessment of how many students are attending first-year BTech classes started on December 1.
In order of state JEE ranks, students first prefer JU and CU comes next.
So when JU starts its own counselling, some students from CU shifted leading to the emergence of fresh vacancies at the university which had started a four-year BTech programme in 2015.
“We want to start the second phase of the counselling at the earliest as the first semester exams are going to be held soon,” said a CU official.
Seats at CU fell vacant because many students switched to central academic institutes as well.
“So we are expecting that the vacancy will further shore up,” said another CU official.
According to a CU professor who teaches at the engineering faculty, filling up seats through independent counselling triggers a larger debate on why the two premier state universities are not able to retain top-notch students.
At Calcutta University, six out of 24 seats remained vacant in computer science and engineering and seven out of 26 seats remained vacant in electronics and communication engineering after the centralised counselling.
The two most coveted streams of engineering at Jadavpur University — computer science and engineering, and electronics and telecommunication — together accounted for 70 of the 261 vacant BTech seats after counselling by the JEE board.
“As the top-notch students are leaving, the seats are getting filled up by those who have less impressive ranks. This does not augur well,” the teacher said.
At JU, the annual tuition fee for an engineering student is Rs 2,400. At CU, the same stands at Rs 6,000.