As Higher Education department has planned to start the first year engineering classes on August 1, the single window counselling for joining the courses being offered by government and private engineering colleges will be completed accordingly, Minister for Higher Education K.P. Anbazhagan has said.
The Minister was here to inaugurate Manonmaniam Sundaranar University’s entrance lawn, 100-foot-tall national flag mast and renovated administrative block, created at a total cost of ₹ 3.50 crore, on Thursday.
Speaking to reporters on the occasion, Mr. Anbazhagan said 509 engineering colleges had submitted 1,78,139 seats to the government for single window counselling, which would commence shortly. Of the 1,59,631 students who had registered their names for joining engineering streams, 1,09,850 turned up for certificate verification. Since only 1,04,453 of them had submitted relevant documents, they would be allowed to participate in the single window counselling.
He said there was no proposal to start new government arts and science colleges during the academic year. “After late Chief Minister Jayalalithaa started 61 government arts and science colleges and four government engineering colleges between 2011 and 2016, 11 more colleges, including three university constituent colleges, were started during 2017–2018. Since 41 university constituent colleges had been converted into government arts and science colleges this year, there is no proposal to start new colleges,” Mr. Anbazhagan said. Students would have to pay lesser tuition fee in government colleges while it would be a bit higher in constituent colleges.
As many as 360 new courses had been started in government arts and science colleges last year. “The State government is introducing new courses in government colleges to enable poor rural students to get higher education in a course of their choice at affordable cost. Since we’re starting more number of arts and science colleges with new courses, the Gross Enrolment Ratio of Tamil Nadu stands at 46.90% while the national average is just over 25%,” Mr. Anbazhagan said.
Asked about the allegations by teachers’ association of irregularities in teacher appointments in the MSU, the Minister said: “If there is any wrongdoing in any of the universities, we’re taking stringent action… At the same time, attempts are being made by a few teachers to malign the universities’ name by levelling baseless allegations.”
Ministers ‘Kadambur’ C. Raju and V.M. Rajalakshmi, Collector Shilpa Prabhakar Satish, MPs and MLAs were present.
