The State government has decided to have centralised counselling for engineering admissions on the Anna University campus in the city for academic year 2012-13.
Amidst demands for decentralisation of the admission process to four centres, the government, in an order dated March 14, cleared the air by stating that the counselling would be centralised and held only in Chennai.
Anna University will continue to be the nodal agency for conducting the single window counselling to admit students to about 1.50 lakh seats under the government quota in over 500 engineering colleges across the State.
The AIADMK government, in its previous stint between 2001-06, had tried the ‘distributed' counselling system in Chennai, Coimbatore, Tiruchi and Madurai but had to give it up as it faced technical glitches. There were delayed counselling sessions as the computer-based allotment of seats could be done only as per rank.
After the return of centralised counselling at the Anna University campus, the number of days of counselling has come down gradually even as the number of students admitted increased over the years.
Last year, 1.04 lakh students were admitted to engineering courses in 502 colleges in 35 days.
A 14-member co-ordination committee has also been constituted with AU Vice-Chancellor Mannar Jawahar as the chairman and Tamil Nadu Engineering Admissions (TNEA) secretary Rhymend Uthariaraj as member-secretary. The members include the secretary for higher education, commissioner of technical education and director of medical education.
“The co-ordination committee will take policy decisions on the conduct of engineering admissions. The first meeting of the committee will be held this month-end,” said Prof. Jawahar. Colleges have been sent letters to provide details on accreditation, principals, faculty other required information by March 28.
“Anna University website ( >www.annauniv.edu ) will have the link to TNEA 2012 from Friday. The site will have details of all the engineering colleges that participated in last year's counselling. The colleges will have to login and update the details on courses, fees and faculty strength and qualifications in the website,” said Mr. Uthariaraj.
Allocation of work will begin by mid-April and like last year, the TNEA will have the 2011-12 cut-off marks in each discipline in each college the day on which the Plus 2 results are announced for the benefit of the students and parents, who often rely on educational consultants to know which college they would get in respect with the cut-off mark.
