Mumbai: For admissions to engineering institutions in Maharashtra, state govt plans to conduct four centralised admission process (CAP) rounds, instead of three, and impose a stringent rule for seat confirmation in the first three rounds from this academic year. While a govt resolution (GR) to this effect is yet to be released, state higher and technical education Minister Chandrakant Patil announced the change in the engineering admission process during a media interaction on Thursday. Engineering admissions are likely to commence after MHT-CET results are out by mid-June.These changes will ensure more engineering seats are filled through the centralised admission rounds and to prevent students from blocking seats until the last admission round, said officials. Seats blocked until the end of the centralised rounds are filled at institutional level, thereby denying a fair chance to students with lower merit ranks.In this year’s admission process, if students are allotted seats in the college of their first choice in the first round, they will have to secure them. Additionally, according to the new rule, if students are allotted seats in one of their top three choices of colleges in the second round and one of the top six choices in their third round, they will have to secure their seats too, said an official. Until last year, students were compelled to confirm their admissions only if they got their first preference.“Several students hold on to the seats they get in the initial rounds by using the ‘float’ option and continue to wait for a betterment chance, thereby blocking the seats until the end of all the rounds. These seats later get converted to management seats, which are filled at the institutional level. Since students continue to block CAP seats, many with lower merit ranks do not get a fair chance in the centralised rounds,” said Vinod Mohitkar, director of technical education. He added that the state used to follow this process about a decade ago, which was changed in the later years. In the fourth round, students will have to take any seat that is allotted to them. Institutional rounds are conducted to fill the remaining vacant seats.Patil said they want to bring in more transparency in the admission process and also ensure a majority of seats in colleges are filled through the state’s centralised process before going to the institutional round. He added that the changes are similar to the ones introduced for polytechnic admissions a few days ago.
