Information on the category of school in TN engineering admissions: Raises hope for State-run school students to get quota

Seeking information with regard to the category of school in the application for seeking engineering admissions in Tamil Nadu has raised the hopes of several thousand students, who had studied in government schools, to get reservation quota this year in the admissions for technical courses.

The previous AIADMK government had provided 7.5 per cent horizontal reservation on a priority basis for NEET-qualified students from government schools in the MBBS admissions in the state after it was recommended by a commission headed by retired High Court Judge P Kalaiyarasan.

As implemented for medical aspirants in the state-run schools, the new DMK government had recently constituted an expert committee to determine internal reservation for government school students in technical and agriculture courses also.

The government decided to form a panel came against the backdrop of reports that in the technical, agriculture, veterinary, fisheries, and in law admissions for the last few years, a lesser number of government school students are getting admissions to state quota seats in universities, reputed self-financing colleges and state-run colleges.

A senior official from the Directorate of Technical Education (DOTE), seeking anonymity, said that as the expert committee has already prepared a report with regard to horizontal reservation even in technical higher education, the government will soon take a favourable decision for the students.

"Therefore, while filling up the application form online, each and every student should mention the category of school from Class six", he said, adding "accordingly, the students have to enter the name of the school, year of passing and in which state they had studied".

The official pointed out that once the applications were filled, the computer system would generate a separate list of the students, who had studied in the government schools for at least six years. "If the government announces the reservation percentage quota for this academic year itself, the rank list will be prepared accordingly", he added.

However, the official made it clear that DOTE has not indicated anywhere in the online application that reservations would be provided for government school students since it has to be officially announced by the government. "At present, we are just preparing only the list of the students studied in the State-run schools", he added.