Odishatv Bureau

Bhubaneswar: Despite reducing the total number of seats by 7000, there seems to be no let up in the vacant seat scenario in engineering colleges across the state. With a whopping 27,852 seats still vacant, the OJEE authorities have pulled up their socks for the special OJEE scheduled on July 22.

There are a total of 80 private and eight government engineering colleges with a total of 38,217 seats. However mere 10,365 candidates have come forward for admissions.

Official sources said that the first preference will be the 4,068 government engineering seats leaving only few takers for the private colleges.

The special OJEE might hardly bring any respite for promoters of private engineering education in the state, opined experts

Attributing it to the lack of interest for the courses following decline in job opportunities, former director of NIT, Rourkela, Sunil Sarangi said, “Students are getting disinterested for engineering courses because of lack of jobs  especially decline in the number of IT jobs. Effort should be on improving the quality of education. Then, Odia students would not go outside for admissions. Rather, students from outside Odisha would have come here to study.”

Meanwhile, the OJEE and the Odisha Private Engineering College Association (OPECA) sounded hopeful of filling up the seats

OJEE chairman Sudeep Kumar Chand said, “This time more students will take advantage of the second OJEE. We are hopeful there won’t be much difficulty in filling up engineering seats this year.”

Echoing similar views, OPECA secretary Binod Das said, “We expect many students will take admission through special OJEE. As seats in engineering colleges have been reduced, and we hope more students will take admission this year as compared to last year.”

Meanwhile, admission quota for students from outside the State has been increased to 25% from the current academic year.

As per reports, a total of 15,293 seats out of the total 44,739 engineering seats had fallen vacant last year after completion of the Special OJEE.

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