File picture of students at an OJEE counselling centre in Bhubaneswar

Bhubaneswar, June 5: The OJEE–2013 counselling will begin on June 10 and continue till June 29. Rank cards are available on the website www.odishajee2013.com for students to download.

While students can fill up forms from their houses, they will have to visit the nodal centres for choice locking.

Twenty-five nodal centres have been set up this time.

In Bhubaneswar, nodal centres have been set up at International Institute of Information Technology, Bhubaneswar, Centre for IT Education Bhubaneswar, Odisha University of Agriculture and Technology, Buxi Jagabandhu Bidyadhar College, Odisha Computer Application Centre and Central Institute of Plastics Engineering and Technology.

These centres will have CCTV cameras and video recording facilities as well as digital signature facilities. Advertising booths and persons accompanying the students will not be allowed into the centres, an official release stated. The university registration fee has been slashed from Rs 16,000 to Rs 5,000 his year, it said.

Fee hike

Students under Biju Patnaik University of Technology (BPUT) have raised apprehensions over the functioning of the fee structure committee set up by the department of technical education that decides the fee hike at technical institutions of the state.

The fee structure committee, constituted under the Odisha Professional Educational Institutions (Regulation of Admission and Fixation of Fee) Act, 2007, revises the fees every three years.

This year, 47 private colleges under BPUT have approached the committee for doubling their admission fees. Students, on the other hand, alleged that the fee structure committee had been deciding on the hikes without conducting any inspection.

“This is sheer violation of the state government’s order. The order states that the committee should conduct a physical inspection of the institutions, which have proposed a fee hike,” said Biplab Prakash Mohanty, president, BPUT Students’ Protection Council.

The department, in its order, had said that the committee should verify if the infrastructure facilities claimed by the institutes were actually available and being provided to the students by the concerned institutions.

“However the committee has already convened two rounds of meeting on fee hikes without any visits,” Mohanty said, adding that the students suspect that private engineering colleges, in nexus with officials of the committee, are trying to hike the fees illegally.

The students alleged that several colleges were operating without basic infrastructure and the minimum teaching staff, and hence they should not ask for a fee raise. In a memorandum to chief minister Naveen Patnaik, the students demanded that that immediate physical inspection of the institutions must be conducted with video recording of the entire process.

They urged Naveen to pass orders that a proper inquiry regarding the infrastructure, lab facility, hostels and teaching facility of the institutes be conducted.

Following increasing incidents of student suicides because of fees hiked by private technical colleges, the state government had, in March, constituted a sub-committee to physically verify at least 25 per cent of the institutions before recommending the hike.