Bhubaneswar, May 27: A decision on the mode of counselling for Orissa Joint Entrance Examination (OJEE) for admission into technical colleges has been deferred. Chief secretary Bijay Patnaik today met officials of the Orissa Private Engineering College Association (OPECA) and the OJEE committee to discuss the matter.
“We met the chief secretary today and made a presentation on the various advantages and disadvantages of the methods of counselling — centralised, decentralised and web-based.
“We have proposed a decentralised e-counselling process which should ideally be conducted at four venues instead of one,” said OPECA secretary Binod Dash.
Patnaik is expected to take a decision by the end of the month after thoroughly going through the pros and cons of each method of counselling. Officials of the industries department, medical education and training department, technical education and training department, and the National Informatics Centre were present at the meeting.
Last year, around 18,000 seats remained vacant in engineering colleges across the state despite conducting two joint entrance examinations.
There were also certain confusions and technical snags in the counselling process, which had delayed the commencement of classes. This time, the OJEE authorities have assured that the counselling process for admission of students would begin either in the first or the second week of July and completed by the end of August.
“Classes for this academic session are scheduled to begin from the first week of September.
“Web counselling is the best mode. But since we do not have sufficient time in hand, we cannot go for this method this time. Moreover, the penetration of internet is not very high in rural areas. Last time, there were several defects which have not been rectified yet. But, if we plan and prepare things all by ourselves, we would be able to conduct web-based counselling,” Dash added.
This year, the OJEE was held in two phases on May 1 and May 8 in 158 centres across the country, including 127 in the state. The results for each of the courses were announced on the website www.odishajee.com last afternoon.
