There was pandemonium at the Karnataka Examination Authority (KEA) on Thursday over the delay in hosting the weblink for challans or epayment of admission fee on the official website.
Although the real allotment of seats for nearly 70,000 eligible Common Entrance Test (CET) candidates was announced on Wednesday, until Thursday afternoon students were unable to download the designated challans for payment of the admission fee.
For the academic year 2013, the KEA had announced that epayment for all CET professional courses was through the Indian Bank only. According to National Informatics Centre, the weblink for epayment was uploaded on Thursday morning, which was available to students after a few hours.
An NIC officer explained, “The CET Real Allotment was announced on Wednesday, and as expected, there was heavy traffic which slowed down the servers at KEA, causing delay. The KEA made a policy decision to upload the epayment weblink the next morning with relatively less traffic, so that students can access both epayment link and the results together.”
Students panicked at the thought of being unable to pay the admission fees online due to the slow servers.
As for the others who opted to pay via demand drafts from other banks, they couldn’t even download the challan to go with it. KEA earlier announced that internet banking and designated Indian Bank challans were the only mode of payment of admission fee.
Mahantesh Reddy, an entrepreneur from Peenya Industrial Area, said his daughter was allotted an MBBS seat in Mysore Medical College, but there was no information about the payment of fees on the KEA website. The last date for payment of fees is July 15 and it has now been delayed by a day. Meghana C, a student who has been allotted a BE seat, said, “Students just have to accept the allotment made by the KEA. If we do not pay the fee now, we cannot even participate in the second round of seat selection.”
S P Kulkarni, administrative officer, KEA, said: “There will be no extension of deadline for payment of fees as the second round of online options has to continue according to the schedule. But the KEA has made arrangements to accommodate demand drafts from other banks apart from Indian Bank in the interest of students.”