Over 1.4 lakh students apply for engineering admission

A senior official from the Directorate of Technical Education (DoTE) told DT Next that 1,43,902 students have applied online as on August 7 night. In comparison, there were only about 1.3 lakh applicants last year. The officials are expecting the number to rise further, as the Centre is yet to announce the schedule for competitive examinations including National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) and Joint Entrance Examination (JEE).

“It is expected that the online registrations would cross 1.5 lakh mark,” he said. “Even the number of students attending counselling this year will also increase by about one lakh compared to last year’s figure of only little over 70,000,” he said.

The official said about 1.14 lakh have also paid registration fees so far. Also, nearly 80 per cent of the candidates have uploaded their original certificates, the last date for which is August 20.

The rank list would be declared on September 7 and the general counselling would start from September 17, he said.

The government has planned to set up more than 50 facilitation centres, which would have experts to clear candidates’ doubts regarding the admission process.

This year, around 1.47 lakh engineering seats are available in about 500 engineering colleges across the State. This is the second consecutive year that the directorate is conducting Tamil Nadu Engineering Admissions 2019 (TNEA-2019), as Anna University refused to conduct following a row with the Higher Education Department over reshuffling the TNEA committee.