Flaw in centralised allotment process rendersmerit seats unavailable

Floating of merit, reserved seats between colleges hits students

Hundreds of professional course aspirants, over the years, may have been denied admissions to engineering and medical courses — in government colleges in particular — thanks to what is increasingly seen as a flaw in the current method of allotting courses and colleges through the centralised allotment process (CAP).

A top official of the Higher Education Department has estimated that in 2016 alone 84 merit seats for the MBBS courses were reportedly unavailable for meritorious students owing to this flaw in allotments. If this is true, the number of engineering seats that remained unavailable likewise could be in the hundreds.

The current method of treating all professional colleges in the State as one unit and shuffling (floating) of merit and reserved seats between them has led to a situation where there is a significant erosion of merit seats from less popular government colleges and a bunching of reserved seats in these college. This system is being followed from 1998 on the strength of a government order.

Floating happens when a candidate with, say, seventh rank and one who has reservation benefits is allotted a college of his choice. Let the total number of seats be 10. That admission would be treated as an admission to the merit seats and not the reserved category.

To make up for this, a merit seat is floated out of a not so popular college to the first college and a reserved category seat floated in to the less popular college. Over the years what has happened is that in less popular colleges there are fewer and fewer merit seats and a bunching of reserved seats.

Impact on quality

Consequently, this has severely impacted the quality of teaching-learning in such colleges. Also, in these less popular colleges the merit to reservation ratio is not kept at 60:40 as mandated by law.

The former Principal Secretary, Higher Education, B. Srinivas, is understood to have recently advised the Education Minister to switch over to an institution-wise allotment system wherein the merit and reservation seats in each college are fixed and immutable. This is the system now being followed in private self-financing colleges and for admission to arts and science colleges. He also reportedly advised the Minister that the current system of floating seats can even be illegal.

According to sources in the Higher Education Department, Mr. Srinivas wanted the government to shift to the institution-based seat distribution system this year itself. The Education Minister is understood to have insisted that reforms be done only next year.

A former Joint Commissioner for Entrance Examinations who spoke to The Hindu said he favoured the institution-wise seat distribution to the current floating system.

“Under the institution-wise seat distribution, there is no confusion and no bunching of reserved seats. Each college is a unit and the merit to reservation ratio maintained in each college,” he pointed out.