15,000 BTech seats remain vacant in PTU

Deepkamal Kaur

Tribune News Service

Jalandhar, August 16

As many as 14,956 BTech seats are lying vacant at IK Gujral Punjab Technical University even after the extended round of counselling held recently.

Of the total number of 25,163 seats which are available in 60 engineering colleges of the university across the state, only 10,207 seats could be filled till August 8. Further, the seats filled through counselling remained dismally low at 2,270 as only 18.45 per cent students came via this mode and the rest chose to approach colleges concerned directly.

The university, which had earlier planned only two rounds of counselling, later held a third round of admission from August 1 onwards in which about 40 of the 60 colleges had participated.

In contrast, there was an intake of 15,890 students for 43,155 seats in 107 engineering colleges in the 2014-15 session just ahead of the bifurcation of the state technical universities. The remaining colleges had gone to Maharaja Ranjit Singh Punjab Technical University, Bathinda. The comparative data has come to The Tribune in reply to an RTI application. Though only 137 students took admission via counselling for 1,200 seats in 19 BPharmacy colleges, the total admissions remained fairly good at 1,186 for this course. There were only 33 admissions for MBA via counselling, whereas a total of 3,851 students have taken admission to 106 management colleges that have 5,250 seats in all.

Like last year, even this time not even a single student took admission in MCA via counselling and all 263 students went for direct admission. There are, however, 1,290 seats in 35 colleges of IKG-PTU offering the course in Punjab.

The university authorities, however, feel that they have faired better this year as compared to previous years going by the seat percentage filled.