Bhubaneswar, July 16: Last minute changes in the counselling schedule for lateral entry into pharmacy and architecture under the Orissa Joint Entrance Examination has irked the aspirants.
The centralised manual counselling for both the courses, which had earlier been scheduled to be held on July 16 and 17, was deferred yesterday. While pharmacy admissions would held on Sunday, the date for architecture is yet to be announced.
Last evening, a revision in schedule was notified on the OJEE website. However, unaware of the notice, many aspirants and their guardians today turned up at College of Engineering and Technology (CET), Bhubaneswar. The college happens to be the only venue for centralised manual counselling.
Students were seen running around the venue and talking to the authorities to be sure about the schedule change. “We did not have any idea that the counselling was postponed yesterday. My daughter did not receive any alert either through SMS or email. The authorities, themselves, do not know about the revised dates,” said Anwari Khanum of Jajpur, mother of an architecture aspirant. She said she had taken a day’s leave from work to accompany her daughter to Bhubaneswar for the counselling.
“We reached Bhubaneswar last evening. Today, at the college, we found only a notice saying that it has been postponed. When we tried calling up the numbers provided on the OJEE website, there was no response,” said another guardian, Gourav Saha of Rourkela.
Vice-chairman of the OJEE committee Sitaram Mohapatra said the counselling dates had been deferred following a high court decision yesterday. “We cannot say anything about the dates since the matter is sub judice. Pharmacy counselling would be done on Sunday for the 81 candidates, who had cleared OJEE,” he said.
Mohapatra said authorities of the Ajay Binay Institute of Technology (ABIT) had filed a petition, regarding the BArch counselling. The bone of contention is the minimum qualification for admission. While the Council of Architecture has fixed the National Aptitude Test in Architecture (NATA) scores as minimum eligibility, the All India Council of Technical Education (AICTE) norms say 40 per cent of NATA score would be considered, but admission is to be done on the basis of OJEE rank. “The ABIT authorities want the admission to be conducted as per the Council of Architecture norms. But, OJEE, a government body, follows the AICTE guidelines,” said Priyabrata Sahoo, secretary of OJEE committee.
Authorities who have filed the petition justified their stand. “The BArch admissions should be conducted as per the Council of Architecture norms, but the OJEE procedure was different so we moved the high court,” said Dharitri Das, principal of ABIT-Piloo Mody College of Architecture, Cuttack.
The next decision of the high court will come on July 22. At present, there are 220 seats available under OJEE for admissions in the BArch courses. Of this, 40 seats are in CET and the remaining seats are at Piloo Modi.
