COIMBATORE: With just seven days left for counselling in the Tamil Nadu Engineering Admission (TNEA) this year, over 1.25 lakh seats are still vacant and approximately 70,000 were filled up. Experts predict that over 1 lakh seats could go vacant after the counselling.
Anna University in Chennai, which is the nodal agency for conducting TNEA, commenced the single-window counselling on June 29. The academic general counselling started from July 1. As many as 1,48,231 students were called for admission to 1,93,116 available seats.
At the end of the counselling on Monday, only 67,877 seats were filled up. Though the university has so far called 93,264 candidates for counselling, over 26 pc of them (67,877 students) failed to turn up, which left the aforementioned 1.25 lakh seats vacant. During the later stage of counselling the number of students failing to turn up can be higher.
“We expect 25,000 to 30,000 more seats to get filled up during the remaining seven days of counselling. A few thousand vocational students may join engineering colleges, the counselling for which was scheduled to be held on July 29 and 30. So, at the end of the counselling, we are expecting that around 1 lakh seats could get filled up in TNEA this year,” said V Rhymend Uthariaraj, secretary of TNEA. This year, a total of about 2 lakh seats were available under TNEA. So, experts predict that around 1 lakh seats --(50 per cent of the available seats) -- could go vacant this year.
During the B Arch counselling held on July 19, of the available 2,042 seats, 1,726 seats got filled up and 316 seats remained vacant.
Former vice-chancellor of Anna University, E Balagurusamy, said, “The engineering colleges which managed to get less than 25 per cent admission in the last three years should be closed down immediately, as it will be impossible for them to run their institution.”