Ranchi, July 20: These are not hot seats, if the first three days of counselling for admission to state engineering colleges, including private ones, are an indication.

The state offers around 3,300 seats through Jharkhand Combined Entrance Competitive Exam Board (JCECEB), but poor infrastructure and image as well as delay in the session have proved to be its undoing.

Around 35,000 students sat for the exams. But when it is admission time, aspirants are not thronging the cradles for counselling.

In fact, of the first 550 in the merit list called in the first three days, only 154 turned up. Even the most prestigious cradle under JCECEB, BIT-Sindri, which is state-run and offers 690 seats, isn’t finding enough takers, though it remains the top draw for students.

Lesser known private cradles will have to scrounge at the bottom of the bin to fill up 2,600-odd seats.

It’s a far cry from the past when BIT-Sindri’s seats were filled in three days flat.

“Absenteeism of candidates is irritating. But yes, students are taking less interest in admission to the state’s private engineering colleges. What is surprising is that less than 25 per cent seats of BIT-Sindri has been filled in three days,” admitted R.K. Singh, officer on special duty, JCECEB.

Engineering aspirant Usha Kumari from Chaibasa, who confessed to have bagged “a medium rank” in JCECEB, candidly said she was giving its counselling a miss. “I’ve obtained a reasonably good rank in the Orissa entrance. I’m not interested in a private engineering college here. Yes, BIT-Sindri is still good. But I won’t make it there,” she said.

Sources said that most private engineering colleges in the state don’t adhere to minimum academic benchmarks but somehow manage to get an approval from All India Council of Technical Education (AICTE) to run degree-level engineering courses and get affiliated to a state varsity.

Two are even run by out-of-work politicians. While former RJD MLA Ramchandra Chandravanshi runs the eponymous Ramchandra Chandravanshi Institute of Technology in Palamau, former BJP MP from Ranchi Ramtahal Choudhary runs RTC Institute of Technology, Anandi.