Bhubaneswar, July 5: Around 19,000 rank holders of Odisha Joint Entrance Examination (OJEE)-2013 attended the first round of counselling for engineering courses, which concluded today.

The list of provisional seat allotment would be out on July 10.

“Aspirants should not report to the provisionally allotted colleges under any circumstances,” said an OJEE official.

Candidates, who choose to withdraw the university registration fee after the provisional allotment between July 11 and 13, will be out of the counselling process.

As a result, they will not be considered for further allotment or upgrade to a college higher in their preference list.

“Only the remaining candidates will be considered for auto upgrade. A final allotment will be available on www.ojee.nic.in on July 16 and students will get alerts through SMS.

They have to download the allotment letters from the website and report to the institution for admission between July 17 and 20,” the official said.

A total of 62,157 candidates had qualified for B.Tech admissions in exam that was held in May. There are 45,000 engineering seats in 92 colleges.

“We expect nearly 5,000 more seats to be filled up in the second phase, the dates for which will be announced soon,” said an OJEE official.

Scheduled castes and scheduled tribe candidates, who have not registered themselves so far, can go for choice re-locking from July 11 to 13.

Engineering aspirants waiting to be allotted a seat can modify their choices during these three days. Despite two rounds of counselling, more than 20,000 seats are likely to go vacant again this year.

“We have secured the court’s permission to conduct admissions to 10 per cent of the seats under the NRI quota. This will help to bring down the vacancy figure to almost 15,000,” said Odisha Private Engineering Colleges’ Association secretary Binod Dash.