HYDERABAD: Medical aspirants, get ready for some really tough competition this year. Over 25,000 students had already applied for EAMCET seeking admission into medical and related fields by Wednesday evening. But the number of seats available is just over 4,000 - 1,900 seats in government medical colleges and 2,350 in private colleges. With March 30 the last date for filing applications, the number of aspirants is only set to go higher. “Going by the trend, the number might go up to 95,000 by the end of this month,” convener of EAMCET-2012 NV Ramana Rao said. Last year only 68,000 students had applied for it, with only 30,000 applications being received by this time last year. In 2010, the total medical aspirants were only 54,000.
The situation could see a large number of students having to let go of their dream of being doctors unless the Medical Council of India clears the state government’s request for increase of medical seats by 1,000. The government has sought 600 more seats in government colleges.
For the aspiring engineers, the going seems to be a little more easy with an expected number of 3.3 lakh students competing for 3 lakh seats. Over 90,000 applications have been received for this stream so far.
According to Ramana Rao, the number of aspirants going up is due to the increasing admissions to schools. The other possible cause is the ease of online application. It used to take over a week to receive the application under the manual system where students had to send it by post or visit the regional centres. But with online applications, over 500 applications were received on the first day itself.