Jadavpur University will hold counselling on its own in December to fill the 70-odd seats in BTech that are lying vacant.
Since class attendance is thinning, the university has decided to send a withdrawal form to all the enrolled students, seeking to know how many of them other than the list of 70-odd students may finally decide to back out, said a JU official.
The total BTech seat count stands at 1,253.
The university has offered to refund the admission fee of Rs 5,000 if the students through the form intimate JU about the withdrawal. “If we get the desired response, we expect the vacancy figure will shoot up to 150,” said an official.
Atal Chaudhuri, the dean of engineering and technology faculty at JU, said the university would hold the decentralised counselling tentatively from December 14 to 17.
“Before the counselling starts, the withdrawal forms would be emailed to the students. We will request them to intimate whether they intend to withdraw,” said Chaudhuri.
A JU official said after the state JEE board conducted the centralised counselling for admission to the BTech programmes for all the institutes, including JU, the university did not find any takers in 48 seats.
Over the past fortnight another 25-odd students informed the university that they were discontinuing following admission elsewhere.
But as the attendance in the online class is constantly thinning, the university is of the view that more students have backed out and they want students to disclose that through the withdrawal form.
“We cannot keep admitting students through the year. So if the students inform about having backed out before December 13, then other aspirants would be given a chance,” said JU pro vice-chancellor Chiranjeeb Bhattacharya.
Asked about the reasons for vacancy, a teacher said JU was not being able to retain its pole position and conceded its space to the NITs that admitted students through JEE-Main.
In the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) exercise carried out by the education ministry, JU had ranked 9th in the engineering category in 2017.
Now, it has slipped to the 17th position.
“In early November, the Bengal government allowed the self-financed engineering colleges to hold decentralised counselling as many seats were vacant. It is understandable that the students don’t intend to pay the steep tuition fee at these colleges for studying BTech, given the worsening job prospect amid the pandemic. But the students are avoiding JU in such large numbers also,” he said.
Another official said preference for the NITs, where the cost of studying was several times higher compared with JU, suggested that JU is gradually conceding its space.
“This could not have been conceived earlier. NITs, with better infrastructure, are luring students away from JU,” he said.
Calcutta University will conduct counselling on its own on December 8 to fill up 49 BTech seats that are lying vacant.
A CU official said since JU would hold counselling later to fill its own vacancies, CU would have to conduct counselling a second time because some of the CU students would opt for JU’s vacant seats.