The Maulana Abul Kalam Azad University of Technology (Makaut), the affiliating authority of private engineering colleges in Bengal, is planning to introduce a new academic session from January every year for its BTech, MBA and some BSc programmes to fill the huge number vacant seats in these courses.

The regular session of the technology university starts in July every year. The new January to December session will be run in addition to the existing one that is held from July to June, a university official said.

Of the 32,700 BTech seats in Bengal, a little over 16,000 have been taken up this year after several phases of counselling that ended in July. The vacancies are highest in the private engineering colleges.

Enrolments of students in several MBA and in-house BSc programmes of the university have been low and the second session is likely to enable the university and its affiliated private colleges to fill the vacant seats, a varsity source said.

Several private engineering colleges, mostly those in the far away districts, have recorded enrolment in even less than five per cent of their seats in their BTech programmes this year.

BTech courses are regulated by the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) and the university will have to take the approval of the apex body for running the new session.

Once the university gets the AICTE’s nod, private colleges affiliated to it will also be able to start the new January to December session for four-year BTech courses, an official said.

But before seeking the AICTE’s approval, the proposal will have to be cleared by the university’s executive council, which is its highest policy-making body, for conducting two rounds of registration of students in a year.

Under the existing system, the university can register students only once in July.

The proposal was recently placed at Makaut’s academic council meeting, where a unanimous decision was taken on starting the new session.

The MBA courses and the BSc programmes will start once the executive council approves them because these courses are run as the university’s in-house programmes and are not under the purview of the council. Therefore, AICTE’s approval is not required for starting the January to December session in these courses, the source said.

The university had opened a number of in-house BSc courses in several new subjects such as big data analytics, block chain technology, cryptography and network security, cyber security, data science, Internet of things, material science and food science and technology.

Intakes in almost all these new BSc courses were “extremely” low, the source said.

Makaut vice-chancellor Saikat Maitra, however, said the winter session was being planned to accommodate a large number of students who would approach the varsity for admissions after completion of the process every year.

The university would often ask them to wait till the next session, which entailed a year loss for the students.

“Students who want a seat after the end of admission for the July session will not lose a year if we can run the January session,” Maitra told Metro.