Over 45K engineering applicants opt out before counselling

Chennai

More than 45,000 students who were seeking engineering admissions in Tamil Nadu and had enrolled online have opted out even before the counselling began.

For the second consecutive year, Tamil Nadu Engineering Admissions (TNEA) is being conducted by Directorate of Technical Education (DoTE) as Anna University refused to do it after a row with the Higher Education Department on the re-shuffling of the TNEA Committee.

A senior official from DoTE told DT Next that a total of 1,60,834 candidates have applied. The last date for registering online applications was on August 16.

“Of the total registration, only 1,31,436 students have paid registration fees,” he said, adding “Of the total number of students, who paid registration fees, as many as 1,14,206 candidates have uploaded their certificates.”

According to him, of the last year’s 1.33 lakh online applications, more than 90 per cent of the students have stayed till the starting of the counselling process.

He said, however, with more than 45,000 students opting out of the admission process this year, the rank list will be prepared in accordance with the current number of applications. Stating that the rank list would be declared on September 7 and the general counselling will start from September 17 and would end on October 15, the official said, “At least one lakh students, who will be in the rank list, will be called for multi-rounds of counselling.”

Stating that the certificate verification could be done in student’s facilitation centres, the official said that DoTE has planned to set up more than 50 such centres, which would guide the student’s doubt with regard to the engineering admissions.

The DoTE official said that a total of about 1.50 lakh engineering seats are available this year in little more than 500 engineering colleges in State.