After the declaration of the results of the West Bengal Joint Entrance Examination 2016, a spur over the slash down of some 2000 engineering seats this year is making headlines. The total number of seats has drastically reduced to 36,263 after a 5% slash from the previously 38,237 seats. The main reasons cited for this slash in seats is poor infrastructure that has forced several colleges to call off certain departments or sometimes the entire college had to be shut down and also the lack of interest shown by JEE rank holders to study in the state engineering institutes.
According to the reports, the two worst hit subjects are Information Technology and Applied Electronics & Instrumentation Engineering as because several colleges have cancelled seats in these two departments. Even with the advent of two new government engineering colleges at Purulia and Coochbehar, the drop in the number of seats due to the closing down of colleges of the likes of BudBud of Burdwan has resulted in a net drop of seats.
In an attempt to resurrect the condition, the state JEE Board has introduced a change in the method of counseling and admission procedure. Unlike previous years where students had to wait till the end of the third round counseling in order to finalize their seat at their respective colleges, from this year onward, students can confirm their seats right after the first round of counseling. This is to stop the additional vacancy that results due to students opting for other institutes by the time they are allowed to finalize their seats in the state institutes, as was seen by the 37% vacancy in the engineering seats in last years state joint examination.
Another important parameter that is overlooked is the fact that the WBJEE Merit List top 10 doesn’t include a single HS 2016 topper, while ISC keeps up the good work by holding the first place for two consecutive years. Not only that, in this years Merit List, both the first as well as the second place has been bagged by students from ISC affiliated schools—Yashvardhan Didwania from DPS Megacity and Abhishek Datta from Kalyani Central Model School. Kolkata fared the best in the state with 3,151 candidates in the top 10,000. It is followed by North 24Parganas (2,205 students), Howrah (1,670), Burdwan (752) and South 24Parganas (504). South Dinajpur has the fewest students in the top 10,000, with only 14 from the district. However good schools and presence of most of the good engineering colleges in and out of the city is the main reason behind Kolkata’ s success according to Sajal Dasgupta, WBJEE Board Chairman.
Results at the female front are quite depressing with Piyali Manna from Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan being the topper amongst girls in WBJEE that too with a rank of 91. The total number of girls who wrote the exam accounted for nearly 27,544 students. Another aspect of this year’s JEE which is bothering the state is the fact that not only have the number of outstation candidates appearing for the JEE increased to nearly 54,139 candidates but they have been quite dominant as far as number of appearances made by them in the top 10000 are considered. Dasgupta informed that all outstation candidates were distributed in the four districts -Kolkata, North 24 Parganas, South 24-Parganas and Howrah and that there are 36,263 seats in the state’s 102 engineering colleges and 1,085 in its 13 pharmacy colleges.
The registration and payment for online counseling will start from 15th June 2016 and those students appearing for the IIT-JEE, counseling will start from July 3rd 2016. Further, the board has decided that all candidates who have appeared in the examination will be given rank cards which has sparked a sort of revolt among the education community as because a part of the community feels it is illogical to provide rank cards to everyone as they can then study engineering at the expense of reserved seats in decentralized colleges. So the WBJEE 2016 has not really just been another session of declaration of results, but has witnessed a few changes and modifications, some supported whereas a few heavily contested.
Source: http://goo.gl/jhOVS7
