Hope rests on 2nd OJEE to fill up engineering seats

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Bhubaneswar: Odisha Joint Entrance Examination (OJEE) authorities are banking on the special examination slated July 22 to fill up the vacant seats in the state’s engineering colleges.
The 80 private and eight government engineering colleges have together 27,852 seats going abegging – bulk of it in the former — despite the number of seats having been pruned by 7000.
Only 10,365 candidates have come forward for admission to the colleges against 38,217 seats available.
Official sources said students will have their eyes on the 4,068 seats in the government colleges as their first preference, leaving only a few takers for the private colleges.
The special OJEE might hardly be able to provide any respite to promoters of private engineering education in the state, experts say.
Attributing it to lack of interest for the courses following a decline in job opportunities, former director of NIT, Rourkela, Sunil Sarangi said, “Students are disinterested in engineering courses because of lack of jobs. The decline in job opportunities particularly in the IT sector has compounded the problem.”
He added that efforts should be on improving the quality of education, so that students from the state would not need to go outside. “Rather, students from outside Odisha would come here to study,” he said.
Meanwhile, the OJEE and the Odisha Private Engineering College Association (OPECA) sounded optimistic about filling up the vacant seats.
OJEE chairman Sudeep Kumar Chand said, “This time more students will take advantage of the second OJEE. We are hopeful that there won’t be much difficulty in filling up engineering seats this year.” Echoing similar views, OPECA secretary Binod Das said, “As seats in engineering colleges have been reduced, we expect many students will take admission through the special OJEE.”
Meanwhile, admission quota for students from outside the state has been increased to 25 per cent from the current academic year.
As per reports, altogether 15,293 seats out of the total 44,739 engineering seats had remained vacant last year even after the special OJEE.