A student fills up a downloded form for e-admission. Telegraph picture

Bhubaneswar, Oct. 15: The e-admission process has been a success in select colleges of the state.

Therefore, the Department of Higher Education (DHE) is planning to start this process in the 1200-odd junior colleges from the next academic year.

The department began the e-admission process in the 2009-10 session, with the launch of the Student Academic Management System (SAMS). The process was started for 60 junior colleges. This included all 50 government colleges. The number of seats available was 30,644. Besides cutting cost of admission, hassles and feelings of uncertainty among the students, this system was started in order to bring in efficiency and transparency in the admission system.

The procedure required high school passouts to download a common application form and a common prospectus from the department’s website www.dheorissa.in.

They could apply for a place in any stream in the 60 junior colleges under the e-admission system. They could also apply for any number of colleges and streams of their choice submit them to the colleges along with the requisite fees.

Processing of applications forms were conducted centrally through an application software, developed by the Orissa Computer Application Centre and SMC, a local software company and intimation to the applicant about his/her selection were disseminated through the department’s, SMS alert, toll-free number 155335, notice board of the applied college and formal intimation letters.

The e-admission process turned out to be an instant hit among both students and parents. This prompted the department to scale up the initiative and introduce this system to 169 colleges next academic year. “DHE, in its third phase, will now include all affiliated colleges of the Council of Higher Education (CHE) in this online admission,” revealed a senior official in the department.

“About 150 Self-Financing Colleges (SFC) in the state will also be included in the e-admission process.

Online admissions will be transparent and tuition fees of each college will be notified in the SAMS, thus bringing transparency to the admission process of the SFCs,” he said.