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Engineering seats go vacant in Karnataka

M D Riti in Bangalore

Payment or "donation" seats in Karnataka's engineering colleges, normally available for Rs 47,000 each, are going abegging this year.

To pare the losses that the private engineering colleges might incur because of low enrollment, the State government has come up with an innovative plan. The seats will now be sold to the managements, of the engineering college, who can sell them at whatever price.

Once the seat allotment process ended, the government found that there were no takers for as many as 6500 engineering seats! These seats, however, are not in the State's best engineering colleges.

Ironically, the entire CET process was set up some years ago simply because college managements were selling such seats at huge prices which ranged between Rs 50,000 and Rs 100,000, making technical education unaffordable for the masses. And now there are no takers for the seats at the prices fixed by the government.

The reasons for this turnaround are not hard to find. The mushrooming of engineering colleges coupled with the economic downturn and the slow revival of the technology sector have made subjects like computer science, which till the other day was the most sought after, quite unpopular.

The State has also decided to allow pre-university students who have cleared their supplementary examinations this year with a minimum of 50 per cent marks to apply for the seats.

The private engineering colleges are desperately hoping that all these concessions will now entice more students to fill up the huge bank of vacant seats.

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