Calcutta University colleges start de-reservation process to fill up vacant seats – Times of India

KOLKATA: With the October 30 deadline for undergraduate admissions closing in, some colleges affiliated to Calcutta University have started the process to de-reserve vacant seats and open them up for the general category.
Prominent institutes, such as Lady Brabourne College, Maulana Azad College and Bethune College have already applied to the state backward classes welfare department, requesting it to allow them to convert several reserved category seats into general ones. While in Lady Brabourne, the vacant seats in the reserved categories are mainly in Urdu, the authorities at Bethune College on Tuesday requested the department to open up five seats in the Hindi department and four in the philosophy department for general category. At Maulana Azad College, however, the number of seats looking to be de-reserved is almost 100.
“The government has asked all the state-run universities to ensure that no seat remains vacant at the end of the admission session. Now that we are nearing the end of the admission process, we wanted to convert the reserved seats into general ones because in those particular subjects, there is no possibility of getting any candidate from the demarcated section,” said a teacher at Bethune College. She added that the process would take some time. “Until we publish several merit lists and ensure that no student from the reserved categories is interested in taking admission to the seats, we can’t approach the government department for conversion,” he pointed out.
At Lady Brabourne College, total seats in Urdu are 50 and the majority is available due to the reserved category. “We have several general candidates awaiting admission in the subject for which we have requested the de-reservation status for those seats. In other subjects, like philosophy, Hindi and Sanskrit, we published a wish list and it allowed us to fill up the vacancies in all the sections,” said principal Siuli Sarkar. A wish list is published after candidates are invited by a college to show interest in studying a particular subject at that institute.
Several other institutes, such as Vivekanada College and North City among others, are at different stages of applying to the department concerned for de-reservation. “We will initiate the process by the end of this week,” said the principal of a CU-affiliated college.
This year, heads of institutions have been worried for a different reason. “We have not received any instructions on how to verify the documents physically. As a result, as and when we begin our general degree classes on the online mode on December 1, as instructed by the state government, we may come across several students who may have found the seats without genuine documents and on fake papers, as we begin the validation process. Then the real trouble will begin because those students will be asked to leave the programmes immediately and seats will turn vacant,” said the principal of another city college.
Officials at the education secretariat are planning to chalk out a method of verifying the documents before beginning the new undergraduate academic session across the state so that such a dire situation does not arise.