BENGALURU: Around 50 PGCET applicants from Scheduled Castes (SCs) category staged a protest at the KEA office in Malleshwaram on Friday, after the caste statuses in their applications were automatically changed to General. The alleged error was made across multiple courses, and not limited to any one specific course.
“We wrote our PGCET examinations and received verification slips with the correct category. But in our mock allotment results, it was abruptly changed General Merit (GM),” said 21-year-old Maha Sonu, one of the protesters vying for a MCA seat.
Sonu said that apart from the category change, the annual family income for all the protesting students were allegedly changed to Rs 8 lakhs per annum. “KEA office bearers told us that we should have updated our categories to SC-A, SC-B, or SC-C (all three are SC sub-categories as per the state government’s reservation system). Many were not aware of this, and the change of our inputs – if that can be deemed as the appropriate course of action – should have come before this, and not during the mock allotments,” he added.
KEA executive director H Prasanna told TNIE that “There are no seats under the general SC category. Seats are available under SC-A, SC-B and SC-C categories. These students did not submit their new caste certificates even after six months. Now, after the results are announced, they are demanding that the new caste certificates be accepted and their category be changed.”
Protesting students alleged that KEA officials behaved rudely with the students at office.