Bhubaneswar, June 16: The online counselling process for the Odisha Joint Entrance Examination (OJEE) commenced today.

In the first phase, counselling started for admission of the lateral entry students in the BTech courses.

Interested students will have to log on to the OJEE portal, www.ojee.nic, to register themselves by entering their details and provide their choices of colleges and preferred branch of study. Following this, the students will be allotted seats based on their ranks and seat availability after verification of their documents. If the candidates do not find a suitable college, they can opt out of the online counselling process, said secretary of the OJEE Priyabrata Sahu.

Students can verify their documents at 25 nodal centres. For BTech, there are 100-odd institutes with nearly 45,000 seats.

As many as 18,093 diploma students will be applying for various BTech seats through lateral entry. However, the diploma results have not been announced yet. The technical education authorities said their results would be declared by June 20, following which document verification for the students would start tentatively by June 25,” said OJEE sources. Arrangements have been made to ensure that fake certificates are checked during document verification. “We have directed the officials at nodal centres to take special care about this. They have also been asked to sign undertaking,” said Sahu.

An OJEE official said counselling for admission to MTech and MPharma, ayurvedic and homeopathic courses would be held in subsequent phases and was scheduled to begin from June 20.

Similarly, counselling for admission in MBA, MCA and PGDM would begin from June 26. This apart, the OJEE would also conduct the counselling for admission in various engineering and medical colleges of the state from June 27.