Cancel web counseling, demands Lok Satta

The Lok Satta Party today demanded immediate cancellation of web counseling and its replacement by personal counseling for admission to engineering colleges to ward off avoidable inconvenience and troubles to students and parents.

Talking to the media, party spokesmen Katari Srinivsa Rao and V. Laxman Balaji said that under web counseling students are thrown into confusion, as they have to choose out of 3000 options in 577 of the 641 engineering colleges.

Mr. Srinivasa Rao, an assistant professor in an engineering college and Mr. Laxman Balaji, an engineer, pointed out that for want of Internet facility, rural students are forced to come to urban areas and stay there for days on end merely to take part in web counseling. If there is disruption in power supply during registration, the students have to repeat the process right from the beginning. The process is playing havoc with the future of students.

The Lok Satta leaders said that there are a number of engineering colleges without the basic infrastructure and teaching faculty. Some college managements are openly selling seats for up to Rs.10 lakh each. The Government should ensure that the seats under the NRI and management quotas are filled as per strict and transparent norms.

The spokesmen said the AICTE (All India Council of Technical Education), which encouraged proliferation of engineering colleges even without basic amenities, did not bother about maintenance of standards in them. A solution lay in total decentralization of the AICTE, they said.