A pair of trains leaves Howrah station on Saturday, carrying aspiring engineers headed south for admission tests to the colleges in Bangalore, the rest of Karnataka, and Tamil Nadu.
Despite 45 private engineering colleges sprouting in and around Calcutta over the past few years, there’s no stemming the exodus from the east.
An exercise carried out recently by the state-run Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) board reveals startling facts and insights into why over 2,500 of an estimated 12,500 seats in the private institutions remain unoccupied.
The board had written to around 15,000 students on why they declined to enrol in courses offered by the engineering institutions in Bengal.
“Replies pouring in from the 15,000 absentees reveal that a chunk of the students with ranks between 1 and 5,000 in JEE are still finding the IITs and the private colleges in other states, particularly Bangalore, more attractive,” said P.K. Ray, an official in the central selection committee of the state JEE board.
The 15,000 students were called in batches by the board to fill up 2,500 vacant seats. Students as far back as the 30,000 rank in JEE were included. However, none of them responded to the call letters.
In reply cards attached to the letters, the students were asked why they had not appeared for the interview sessions.
According to the responses, a bulk of the students between 5,000 and 20,000 rank had not joined the courses primarily for monetary reasons.
“I have not taken admission to a private engineering college as my parents will not be able to afford the high fees (around Rs 40,000 a year for tuition alone),” read one of the replies.
Many from this middle rung also revealed that they had reappeared in the 2004 JEE with hopes of a higher rank, enabling them to secure berths in government-run colleges like Jadavpur University and Shibpur Bengal Engineering College.
These, with fees as low as Rs 500 per month, would solve the money problem.
Another section of students, according to officials, couldn’t join the courses since they failed to clear their Higher Secondary (HS) examinations. “This shows that students who don’t even have the merit to pass the HS exams are being selected for engineering courses, all for the sake of filling up vacant seats,” said a state higher education department official. “This is a dangerous trend,” he warned.
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