Engineering Counselling To Be Conducted In Chennai

The State Government has come across a decision in order to have an centralized counselling for engineering admissions on the Anna University campus in the city for the upcoming academic year 2012-13. Though the Amidst demands for decentralization of the admission process to four centres, but, in order to the dated day on March 14 the government cleared the discussions stating that the counselling would be centralized and held only in Chennai.

Anna University will continue to be the nodal agency for conducting the single window counselling to admit students to about 1.50 lakh seats under the government quota in over 500 engineering colleges across the State. The AIADMK government, in its previous stint between 2001-6, had tried the 'distributed' counselling system in Chennai, Coimbatore, Tiruchi and Madurai but had to give it up as it faced technical glitches. There were delayed counselling sessions as the computer-based allotment of seats could be done only as per rankings.

After the return of centralized counselling at the Anna University campus, the number of days of counselling has come down gradually even as the number of students admitted increased over the years. As per the records say, last year around 1.04 lakh students were admitted to engineering courses in 502 colleges in 35 days.

A 14-member co-ordination committee has also been constituted with AU Vice-Chancellor Mannar Jawahar as the chairman and Tamil Nadu Engineering Admissions (TNEA) secretary Rhymend Uthariaraj as member-secretary. The members include the secretary for higher education, commissioner of technical education and director of medical education.

Prof Jawahar Rhymend said “The co-ordination committee will take policy decisions on the conduct of engineering admissions. The first meeting of the committee will be held this month-end”. Letters have been sent to all colleges to provide details on accreditation, principals, faculty other required information by March 28.