Letter From Bangalore: College admissions - a new twist

The good news is that the delayed monsoon has arrived. The bad news is that like the gusty winds blowing away the clouds around Karnataka's capital, managements of 41 private medical, dental and engineering have blown away the happiness of parents of students seeking admission to professional colleges.

The managements to this select band of professional institutions have decided to conduct a separate admission process, different from the Central Entrance Test (CET) that was conducted by the Karnataka government two weeks ago, in which over 135,000 students from all over the country participated.

Monday's newspapers carried almost full page advertisements calling for separate applications from candidates seeking admissions to these colleges. The college managements have also announced the fees and the number of seats that are available for the candidates in each of the institutions.

The fees for medical vary from Rs 250,000 to Rs 275,000, dental ranges from Rs 150,000 to Rs 175,000. The advertisement does not say a word about fees in engineering colleges.

On the face of it, the fees appear less than what the government's fee committee has proposed for approval by the state cabinet. The fee committee had suggested Rs 9,200 for scheduled castes and scheduled tribes, Rs 35,000 for general and other backward classes and Rs 265,000 to Rs 290,000 under payment seat category for medical colleges that do nothave attached hospitals and those with hospitals respectively.

For dental colleges, the fee was fixed at Rs 6,900 for scheduled castes and tribes, Rs 25,000 for general and other backward classes and Rs 190,000 for payment seats. And, for engineering, the figures were Rs 10,000, Rs 20,000 and Rs 55,000 for the respective categories.

The reason for this confusion is that the managements wants the government to adhere to a 50 : 50 sharing of seats instead of the 75:25 norm as decided by the cabinet. The managements are not even saying that they will not accept the students sent by the government on the basis of the CET.

The managements are saying that they will take the CET candidates to as much as 50 percent of their seats. ``The idea is very clear. They will earn more money by having total control over another 25 percent of the seats,'' says a government official.

``If we do not have this scheme, it will just not be possible for us to run our colleges, particularly medical and dental. This is the reason why we have not announced the fees for engineering colleges in our list,'' says a representative of the private managements.

The only weapon the government has is to ask universities not to recognise the admission of candidates by this set of private managements which include powerful caste groups like the JSS group of institutions, the KLE society, the Adichunchunagiri Mutt run institutions, the MS Ramaiah group, the Dayananda Sagar group and the KS Hegde group of institutions.

``They will all fall in line as time passes,'' says one minister confidently.

These private managements have announced the last date for filing applications with their Consortium of Medical, Engineering and Dental Colleges, Karnataka ( COMED-K) is July 3.

Uncertainty is expected to reign, until that date given the previous performance of the government on this issue. It took four months to look at the Supreme Court judgement delivered in October 2002 before holding unsuccessful talks with the private managements to safeguard the interest of the deprived sections.