Mumbai: Over 6,800 in-house quota seats added to online pool

Over 6,800 in-house quota seats have been added to the pool of seats available for admission to junior colleges in the online process. Now, students have the option to apply for 99,735 vacant seats in the junior colleges across the city and suburbs. According to a court order, minority colleges surrendered their in-house quota seats to the Centralised Admission Process (CAP) on Thursday. There are around 500 minority junior colleges in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region and together, they had over 12,000 vacant seats after second round of admissions. Of these, a little over 50 per cent seats have been surrendered for online admissions.

Currently, there are around 1.43 lakh applicants against the 99,735 seats available online. An official from the education department told The Indian Express that the remaining 80,000-odd seats are in the management, in-house and minority quota, which are out of the online system. There are over 53,000 seats in the Commerce stream that are now vacant, 31,594 seats are vacant in the Science stream and 12,365 seats are available in Arts.

Candidates have to fill in their preferences by Saturday. The Nagpur bench of Bombay High Court had on July 16 asked the government to return all vacant quota seats — minority (50 per cent), management (20) and in-house (5) — to the college that could admit students. But on Wednesday, the bench allowed minority colleges to surrender only their in-house quota seats under CAP, leading to confusion.

“We were hoping that with the latest judgment, the total available seats would increase but colleges have released very few seats. … there is still no solution in sight,” said Sonal Sanghvi, whose son Krutharth has not been allotted a seat despite scoring 89.67 per cent.

Suvarna Kharat, the deputy secretary, school education department, said: “Since the seat matrix has changed again, the students have to be very careful while marking preferences. We have released a list of vacancies. They must fill up their choices judiciously.” It is the third time that the candidates will fill up their preferences.
News source (Indian Express)