Engineering admissions; Students resigned to their fate

The virtual battle fought by the Telangana and AP governments for oneupmanship in engineering admissions, which played out in the recent months, has reached its climax. But amid this uneasy hush, it is the student community that is still reeling from its ramifications -- and probably will have to bear this brunt for many more years to come.

Even as they nurture faint hopes over a possible second round of counselling, aspirants are being threatened to 'confirm' their admissions by engineering colleges, allocated to them during first phase of counseling or to make way for other 'willing' candidates.

Piqued over what has befallen them, the students have no other option but to bow to the constant reminder from the managements that the second phase of counselling is a non-starter.

One such candidate, A Rachana who had secured a rank above 50,000 in the Eamcet has set her eyes on the second round of counselling till last week. With anxiety levels rising on one side and her persuading father on the other, she had finally 'retained' the seat she had been allotted in the first phase.

'Since I am not sure whether there would be a second round of counselling and not confident of securing the seat that had been allotted in the first phase, I finally relented. My father said it would serve no purpose whether it is a good or bad college, after half of the syllabus is finished,' she says, relieved of huge stress that she had endured in the last couple of months.

While things have come to such a pass, the attitude of both governments seems to be that of wait and watch. No wonder, the unique situation has come as a blessing in disguise for governments as this inordinate delay would only save them from the huge financial burden for paying the tuition fees of students.

Sample this comment of a senior official in the Telangana government, 'Though there was a huge hue and cry about students going to other States for engineering education, the fact remains that only those who genuinely needed financial assistance had stayed back. That means, our work of identifying real beneficiaries of financial support has been made easy.'

The roadblock at every stage of admission process is testing aspirants' patience as whether to continue with perseverance, which in all probability has good chance of becoming a futile wait or opt out of engineering admissions. The latest impediment in this unending saga is the High Court's criticism of the Telangana government over the latter's controversial provisions in the FAST scheme.

'If filing a counter takes three weeks, what about hearing and judgment? As for such cases, there would be someone who files a review petition,' says Ranjith Kumar, who is relying on the government's financial aid to continue his studies.

When contacted about amount of work left vis-a-vis framing FAST guidelines, a member of FAST Committee said, 'As for the court's observation, we haven't yet received anything in writing. Anyway, we have enough time to file the counter-affidavit in three weeks. However, the work relating to developing a mechanism for FAST scheme is under way.'

Although the AP government has said it would reimburse the tuition fee of 'local' students in conformity with the Presidential Order, no orders have been issued to this effect till date. Still worse is situation of those students, with AP roots, who are studying in Telangana districts as they are nowhere in the picture.