BENGALURU: When the Supreme Court declared the National Eligibility Entrance Test is the only gateway for admission to MBBS and BDS courses across the country , the Karnataka Examination Authority (KEA) least expected an engineering seat-blocking racket to raise its ugly head.
The KEA is no stranger to seat rackets, but it was confined mostly to medical seats all these years. This time, the operators are reportedly eyeing engineering seats to make quick money . The KEA-conducted Common Entrance Test's score is counted for admission to engineering courses. The CET counselling -an elaborate, many-rounds exercise that lets a student pick a seat in a college of her choice -is expected to end days before the NEET counselling starts. This means a student looking at both engineering and medicine courses will have to wait till the NEET counselling ends before deciding on the course or college.
In this huge gap between two counselling sessions lies the racket. As per a Supreme Court directive, the CET counselling for engineering seats must end before July 30.NEET results are expected in August, and counselling might start a while later. According to sources in the KEA, many students are likely to block engineering seats at premier colleges in the state as a backup if they don't get an MBBS seat of their liking. This means hundreds of engineering seats will remain blocked till the last day of NEET counselling -which will be weeks after the KEA ends the CET counselling session.
In this race to hold on to seats, thousands of other engineering aspirants are likely to miss out on good colleges or courses. Karnataka has 201 engineering colleges with over 1lakh seats as of last year.