Bhubaneswar, Aug. 5: The Odisha Joint Entrance Examination (OJEE) board will conduct a second round of web counselling from August 6 to 11 to fill up the huge number of vacant seats in private engineering colleges.

The decision was taken on Saturday after 17,242 students turned up for the final seat allotment process, leaving around 23,000 seats vacant.

Now, candidates, who have a valid OJEE-2012 rank card, but have not been allotted any seat in the first phase of admissions, are eligible to be a part of the vacancy round counselling beginning tomorrow. The process would also remain open to candidates, who have an All-India Engineering Entrance Examination (AIEEE)-2012 rank card or those who did not register for the previous round of counselling.

Registered OJEE-2012 or AIEEE-2012 candidates, who did not get their documents verified earlier or those who withdrew after the provisional seat allotment process, can participate in this vacancy round counselling. Fresh online registration and choice filling will begin from August 6 to 11 on www.ojee.nic.in.

The candidates would be asked to report to the assigned nodal centres for counselling, part admission fee deposit, document verification and choice locking from August 9 to 11 between 9am and 6pm.

However, each centre will cater to candidates from specific zones and cities, the information of which has been provided on the OJEE website www.odishajee.com.

Seats will be allotted on the basis of combined general rank and this list would be out on August 14.

“All candidates appearing for document verification in this round have to deposit a counselling fee of Rs 450. They would also need to pay the part admission fee Rs 16,000 during document verification unless they have done so earlier in the first round,” said OJEE committee secretary Priyabrat Sahoo.

The trend of vacant seats started in 2009 when 9,000 of the 31,000 seats remained vacant. The admission position in the subsequent years did not improve as 22,000 of 38,000 seats went unoccupied in 2010 and 21,000 of the 40,000 seats did not find any takers in 2011.

While there seems to be no respite against the vacancy crisis, the number of engineering seats in the state has consistently increased over the last four years.