Counseling Ahead

About 288 private engineering and management colleges in the state are upgrading the prescribed infrastructure in order to be eligible for participating in the counseling process, which is expected to be announced soon after results of EAMCET 2015 are released by the state government.

These college managements are going through a tough time as the Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University (JNTUH) officials are conducting inspections at these colleges for some time.

These inspections may continue for some more time as JNTU officials are taking extra care to draw inference based on the earlier fact-finding reports prepared by them and the current status of infrastructure in these colleges. It is learnt that around 30 engineering colleges have voluntarily chosen not to participate in the counseling.

Telangana engineering and professional colleges association chairman N Goutham Rao said that AICTE has already approved about 288 colleges to participate in the counseling, however they were awaiting the JNTUH inspection reports. “Once the inspection report is completed, mostly within a week, most of these colleges would be part of the counseling process,” he said.

The college managements have been raising questions over the way JNTUH officials have been conducting inspection and eventually depriving them of admissions. These colleges have secured the approval of AICTE after several rounds of court cases over the past one year.

With the inspection reports yet to be finalised, it is unclear as to how many colleges, the number of courses and seats would be allowed by JNTUH inspection during the 2015-16 academic year.

On the other hand, JNTUH registrar and EAMCET-15 convener N V Ramana Rao said that it was too early to come to any conclusion about the number of colleges at this moment.

He said, “We have been carrying out inspections at some of the colleges where the standards were not maintained. We are examining aspects like infrastructure, academic and technical requirements necessary to impart quality higher education.”

Rao said that after the announcement of counseling date by the deputy chief minister Kadiyam Srihari, the inspection report would be uploaded on the JNTUH website.

About 1.28 lakh students have attempted the EAMCET 2015 engineering examination that was conducted earlier this month. The volume of engineering students opting for engineering would depend on the pass percentage in the test.

Last year, about 50,000 engineering seats were left vacant even though the participating engineering colleges were less in number.