A group of 77 students who had got into five private engineering colleges of the city through the backdoor lost their seats on Tuesday.

Calcutta High Court upheld the West Bengal University of Technology (WBUT)’s contention that no student other than those admitted under the management quota could skirt the process of pre-admission counselling. None of the penalised students had attended a counselling session before being admitted against vacancies created by some of the selected candidates opting out.

In cancelling the illegal admissions, the division bench of Chief Justice S.S. Nijjar and Justice S. Banerjee set aside Justice S.K. Gupta’s interim order to the university authorities granting the 77 students “provisional registration”. That order was meant to allow the students to write their first semester examination.

Capitation fees was banned by the Supreme Court in 2003 but it exists by another name — management quota. Every private engineering college is at liberty to put a price on 10 per cent of the available seats. Candidates for the management-quota seats must clear the Joint Entrance Examination but need not attend any counselling session.

The 77 students against whom the court has ruled were accommodated against vacancies in the general category before the JEE board could complete the process of counselling and distribute the available seats according to merit. “The colleges should have informed the university before taking in these students,” a senior government official said.

The five colleges are BP Poddar Institute of Management and Technology (15 students), Future Institute of Engineering and Management (20), Institute of Engineering and Management in Salt Lake (39) and Calcutta Institute of Engineering and Management (3).

The WBUT had no choice but to allow the 77 students to sit for the semester examination, held in September, after they moved court and won an interim verdict.

Junior standing counsel Subrata Mukhopadhyay, who appeared in court for the JEE selection committee, hoped Tuesday’s order would deter private engineering colleges from making a mockery of the admission process in future.

But officials of the five private engineering colleges under the scanner denied having done anything wrong. “We had informed the WBUT authorities about the number of vacancies after some students in the original list opted out,” a lecturer said.

The colleges are planning to appeal against the high court’s ruling. “We will go to the Supreme Court soon,” a spokesperson for one of the institutes said.