Pvt engg colleges move SC over vacant seats

BHUBANESWAR: Worried over large scale vacancies in engineering colleges, the Orissa Private Engineering College Association (OPECA) on Monday moved the Supreme Court seeking permission to fill up the seats at college level. OPECA in its petition alleged that despite the directive of Orissa High Court, the state government did not take any steps to fill up the seats.
"There is a limit to the callousness of the state government towards technical education. The government is silently sitting over the issue without informing anyone about what steps they are taking about large scale vacant seats. When the government ignored the High Court order, we were forced to move the Supreme Court," said honorary secretary of OPECA, Binod Dash.
Of the total 41,000 engineering seats in 110 technical institutes in Orissa over 24,000 seats are lying vacant this year against the vacancy of 18,000 seats last year. Similarly in MBA and MCA, over 3420 and 2970 seats are lying vacant respectively.
Officials, however, maintained that the state government had urged the AICTE not to approve new technical college or increase seats without the government's recommendation following a high court directive to make a request to AICTE to relax its norm. "The state government has urged the AICTE not to allow more colleges or increase in seats in engineering and diploma courses without state government's recommendations," said industry secretary T Ramachandru.
On the other hand, OPECA said, all these efforts are just an eyewash and futile. "Orissa government every year writes such letter to the AICTE but this is going to be ineffective as usual. The state government has no say in the AICTE nor do they ever pursue any issue with the AICTE. Only writing a letter is not the solution," said Dash.
"After the intervention of the Supreme Court a second round of JEE held to fill up vacant seats for the last couple of years. But this year the state government did not take any step despite it was decided in the Policy Planning Board," Dash added.