Deccan Chronicle:Tuesday, December 27, 2011.
Touts and agents are earning big time money every year as the state government still hasn’t come up with a law to curb the menace of seat blocking in the private professional colleges. It’s not just medical Under Graduate and Post Graduate courses, even engineering seats are easy targets for these agents. According to the documents accessed through Right to Information Act (RTI), in 2010-11, hundreds of students were admitted above the actual intake fixed under the management quota as per the consensual agreement. But Directorate of Technical Education (DTE) officers deny any scam in this and say such admissions are permitted under the consensual agreement. The consensual agreement states unfilled CET/COMEDK all India general merit seats will be converted into management quota after two rounds of counselling. According to the documents available with Deccan Chronicle, in the academic year 2010-11 in many prestigious colleges of the state excess admissions were made under the management quota. These excess admissions have all been attributed to unfilled CET and COMEDK merit seats. Speaking to this newspaper, a senior officer of the higher education department said these excess admissions were regularised at a reconciliation meeting by the Directorate of Technical Education (DTE). The modus operandi is very simple. “Fixing the few CET/COMEDK students and vacating the merit seats after the final round counselling. As per the consensual agreement all such vacant seats become management quota seats. Later such seats will be sold for lakhs of rupees,” he said. “In prestigious BMS college of Engineering (Aided), only three civil engineering seats were allotted for management through the consensual agreement. But as per the DTE records, 14 students were admitted under the management quota. Nobody knows how so many seats went to the management quota when college is an aided one. Still no inquiry is ordered,” he said. When contacted Dr. K. Panduranga Shetty, vice president, Karnataka Unaided Professional Colleges Association said he will not comment on the issue.