12 engineering colleges in Maharashtra, which were previously barred from admitting students, have been allowed by the Bombay high court to continue being part of the common admission process. A division bench of Justice Anoop Mohta and Justice V L Achliya, however, asked the managements of the colleges to update about the steps that they have taken to remove the deficiencies pointed out by the AICTE in these institutions.

The court said that the deficiency aspect requires consideration, adding that they also need to consider whether the requisite facilities and infrastructure are available to the students. The judges also focussed on the shortfall in faculty which was mentioned in the case of some colleges. “The lack of the adequate teachers is a problem and continues for years. If the managements want to run the college they have to ensure standards are maintained”, the bench said.

The judges also pointed to the conditions that managements have to provide specific area of land for the college campuses.

According to media reports, the colleges had approached the high court, which had earlier in an interim order, allowed their names to be mentioned in the list of institutions in the common admission process. The college managements claimed they had not been given a proper opportunity to present their side and many of the deficiencies had been removed. They also said that the faculty problems were due to lack of timely approvals by the state and university authorities.

The HC has scheduled further hearing of the case on July 9. The CAP round commences from Friday, when students will have to confirm their choice of colleges. The first round of college allotments will be held on June 30, 2015.

According to Citizen Forum for Sanctity in Education System, these 12 engineering colleges in Mumbai had failed to follow AICTE norms—having good infrastructure, land and enough of teaching staff—because of which they were issued show cause notice. AICTE will now give them a hearing before taking a decision.

There are about 25 engineering colleges in Maharashtra awaiting AICTE approval. Of these, 12 are in Mumbai.

 In West Bengal, the higher education department has started with the initiation of a system that will require universities to complete all student-related services within a stipulated timeframe. As a first step in this direction, the department officials recently held a meeting with university registrars and asked them to set time limits for services like publication of results and issuing duplicate certificates. In case of a breach, the university officials will be held responsible and will be liable to pay a penalty.

Reports claim that few powerful institutes are uncomfortable with this new development as it will come as a dent on their established authority. Furthermore, with this new development, a teacher will not be able to get away by flaunting his or her position if they loses answer scripts. Incidentally, West Bengal University of Technology had introduced a central checking system to prevent loss of answer scripts. The system also helps the administration to keep tabs on teachers. But WBUT discontinued it last year.

In the meeting held at Bikash Bhavan on Thursday, university registrars have agreed to propose a time frame after it is routed through the highest executive bodies in universities: the Syndicate or the Executive Council.

Educationist says that the government wants universities to focus on student-related services to enforce accountability under the West Bengal Right To Public Service Act.

 While mapping admission seekers’ trend at the reputed Delhi University (DU), it has been found that 70 per cent of students in ‘popular’ colleges are not from Delhi, but outstation students. To name them, St. Stephens, Shri Ram College of Commerce, Lady Shri Ram, Hindu, Miranda House, Ramjas or Hansraj, are the popular colleges of DU, and most sought after destinations among outstation aspirants.

Interestingly, 50 per cent of the aspirants who applied for sociology at Sri Venkateswara College were from Assam alone.

A media report mentions a top Delhi College principal informing that at times as much as 75 per cent of students in the college are not from Delhi, which goes to show the aspirations of the youth to get the best education in the country.

It may be mentioned that even when the admission rigmarole is over, the outstation students have to hunt for a suitable accommodation where they will have to spend the next three years of their student life. This is because there are limited seats available in the college hostels. Several independent and political students’ groups have been raising the issue of lack of infrastructure and hostel facilities for students from outside Delhi.

 This year has seen a slight dip in a few subjects but massive jump in cut offs for humanities at Delhi University (DU). The main reason behind this is that colleges have been forced to issue a single cut off for every stream this year.  Therefore, they have set their cut offs close to the upper limits of their last year’s ranges.

It is important to analyse the cut offs for various courses at different colleges. Last year, the percentage for English cut off at Ramjas College was 91.5 per cent and 97.5 per cent with the lower limit meant for humanities’ students. This year it is 96 per cent for all. This means a jump of 5.5 percentage points for humanities’ students and a drop of 1.5 percentage points for commerce students. Daulat Ram College English cut off was 91 per cent and 97 per cent for science students in 2014. This year it has set it at 95 per cent.

At Hindu, English (Hons) applicants from humanities and science will see an increase of 0.75 and 0.25 percentage points while commerce students will see a decrease by 0.75 percentage points. Considering the vast majority of the applicants are from English-medium backgrounds and would’ve studied English-core as a subject, the 2.5 percentage point penalty has no impact here. Only those students with elective English will benefit form a 2 per cent advantage. The cut offs for English have gone up dramatically in off-campus colleges like Ramanujan (93 per cent from 85 per cent) and Dayal Singh (96 per cent from last year’s 85 per cent).

Similarly, this year’s cut offs are closest to last year’s upper limits at Hans Raj, Hindu, Kirori Mal and Ramjas. But the docking of 2.5 percentage points from the best-of-four subjects’ aggregates will work with subjects not common to science courses, humanities and commerce streams.

Among the science courses, BSc (H) computer science has seen some of the highest cutoffs—100 per cent for one stream at Indraprastha College and College of Vocational Studies and 99 per cent for a stream at Atma Ram Sanatan Dharma, Bhaskaracharya College of Applied Sciences, PGDAV, Ram Lal Anand and Shaheed Rajguru College of Applied Sciences. Hansraj has retained its last year’s physics cut off— 97.33 per cent but raised for chemistry marginally from 97 per cent to 97.33 per cent.

It may be mentioned that as streams cannot be changed in science, the computation of BO4s is easier for science courses (essentially, BSc (H) physics and chemistry) as the required subjects are physics, chemistry and mathematics.

Furthermore, 21 colleges are giving relaxation to girl candidates ranging from 1 per cent point to 3 per cent point in cut off. 15 colleges have given relaxation on all courses to girl candidates in cut off.

 A day before the admission process was to start for all centrally funded technical institutes, it had to be postponed till further notice due to non-availability of JEE (Main) ranks for paper I and paper II.

CBSE was not able to announce the JEE (Main) ranks on June 24. The registration for the joint seat allocation process was scheduled to start from 25^th June 2015. This is the first year that the premier engineering institutes will have a joint admission process along with NITs, IITs and other centrally funded technical institutes.

Over 11 lakh students were supposed to be part of the process for nearly 34,000 seats in 85 government-funded technical institutes.

The joint seat allocation authority (JoSAA) will be meeting in Delhi to decide on the further course of action. The first round of allocation, which was to begin on July 1, will now be delayed. Till last year, IITs and NITs conducted the seat allocation process separately.

It may be mentioned that in 2013, amid the prevailing confusion over admissions in Centrally-funded technical institutes (CFTIs), IITs had refused to fall in line with the HRD Ministry’s order for a joint Central seat allocation board (CSAB), 2013.