The Madras High Court has directed the Anna University to publish in its website the pass percentage statistics of all the engineering colleges affiliated to it for 2011-12 before counselling, which is slated to begin on June 17.
The first bench of Acting Chief Justice R K Agrawal and Justice M Sathiyanarayanan gave the direction on Friday, while passing interim orders on a public interest writ petition from D Bhoobalasamy praying for a direction to the Anna University and the AICTE to publish in the prospectus/booklet for admission in engineering courses under the single window system (SWS), the pass out percentage of each college coming under the SWS and to provide separate identification to each of the colleges having similar names and their rank list.
According to the petitioner, while he was guiding his daughter who was completing plus two this year, for engineering admission, he came across several anomalies. There were 521 engineering colleges in TN. Of them, 29 came under the government and government-aided group while the remaining were self-financed colleges. There had been several reports that these colleges did not match the standards as laid down by the AICTE Act. Recently, there had been reports saying that the employability of the students coming out of the engineering colleges was very poor.
Despite this, there has been various advertisements and reports stating that some engineering colleges were top rank holders. The colleges listed themselves at a particular rank within the State and lured the students. The students, after joining the colleges, found that the factual situation was contrary to what had been portrayed in the rank list. Therefore, the Anna University should be directed to analyse all the 521 institutions in terms of their infrastructure, teaching faculty, results and other progressive performance and prepare a rank list. Through such process, a healthy competition could be created, he added.
