Bhubaneswar, July 6: When students logged on to www.dheorissa.in to fill up the Plus Two admission forms after 5:30 pm, the only thing that they could find was “This website is under construction”. Next to this piece of information was the picture of a computer wearing an orange coloured builder’s helmet flanked by four traffic cones.
Thirty minutes later, the screen turned from white to blue and read “Server will be under maintenance from 5.45pm to 6.30pm. Please visit after 6.30 pm”. After over one hour, the website was finally functional at 7.50pm.
Apart from this, the congestion in the server has made the filling-up of e-application forms a highly time-consuming affair.
“Generally it takes just about five minutes to submit an application form online. But now, it is taking more than an hour,” said Subhashree Sahoo, an applicant. “Generating print-outs of the forms is taking unusually long. Even after the form is successfully submitted, the link fails and the server shows error,” she added.
Students and parents are demanding that the last date for online application, which is July 9 as of now, be extended if such problems persist.
Sonalisha Mohanty, who works at the computer centre of BJB (Junior) College, said due to the slow server, the number of applicants coming to the centre daily has decreased to less than 20 from last Saturday. “We had to install a router today to ease the burden on the server,” Mohanty said.
Contacted, the person answering the toll free helpline number (155335) for e-admissions said the internet had become patchy since the department of higher education (DHE) website was being accessed by students applying for both Plus Two and Plus Three.
More than 2.4 lakh students have already applied online and the DHE is expecting around 25,000 more students to apply, said departmental secretary, Chandra Shekhar Kumar.
“We have received complaints. Since the last date for form fill-up is near, there is a great deal of load on the server. That is why we are closing the site for maintenance for some time everyday. Today, we have increased the bandwidth,” said Kumar, adding the last date for online application will not be extended.
