Over 46% of Engineering courses seats lying vacant in Tamil Nadu

A total of 2,05,268 Engineering seats are available in over 525 government, government-aided and private colleges affiliated to Anna University.

Around 93,982 Engineering seats are lying vacant in these colleges.

Most of these seats belong to private institutions - government-aided colleges and university departments have less than one per cent vacancies.

The seats lying vacant worse than last year, nearly 55,000 seats were left vacant.

This year, there has also been a slight dip in the demand for Engineering courses, Mr. Gandhi said.

At least 45,800 students did not turn up for counselling this year, despite being eligible.

Engineering branches that were least in demand this year were computer science and information technology, with nearly 60% of seats in these branches staying vacant.

"I expected him to get into a good college in Chennai, but his marks are very low. My daughter who graduated from a college near home two years ago is yet to get a job so there is no use spending over Rs. 7 lakh on Engineering," G. Karthik, who had come with his father, Gunasekharan K said.

Anna University officials said the vacancies have increased because, this year most private colleges surrendered more than the mandated 65 per cent of their seats for general counselling.

"We received 2 lakh applications, a little more than last year, and over 1 lakh students have enrolled, which is a large number," an official said.