No scope for both online and offline admission: TNEA

This was the bone of contention at the Madras High Court, which is seized of two public interest litigations seeking both online and offline modes for counselling and admission process for engineering courses in Tamil Nadu.

Directing the secretary, Tamil Nadu Engineering Admission (TNEA), Anna University, to find out the possibilities of adding any other mode of payment, a vacation bench of Justice V Parthiban and Justice P D Audikesavalu adjourned the case for further hearing to Thursday.

Appearing for one of the petitioners, CVM P Ezhilarasan, the MLA of Kancheepuram belonging to the DMK, senior counsel P Wilson submitted that the online mode allows payment of the prescribed fee only through three modes – credit card, debit card, or internet banking. It was unfair to expect a student from rural area to have such facility, he argued and charged it to be a clear-cut attempt to prevent such students from enrolling in engineering course. 

To buttress his contention, Wilson pointed out that a policy note submitted by the State in the Legislative Assembly in 2012 clearly states that broadband internet facility would be made available to all the rural areas of the state only by 2023, and that there were over 16,000 villages that have no such facility.

However, in the counter, the TNEA secretary submitted that it was not possible to offer both online and offline counselling, as college and branch are allotted to the candidates based on the merit list prepared by the TNEA counselling authority.

Noting that the candidates would be called for counselling based on their overall rank, the counter submitted that although there were approximately 50 per cent of the students from Tamil medium, there would not be any difficulty in online counselling because all the instructions were made available in Tamil, too.

Moreover, to facilitate the counselling process, 42 TNEA Facilitation Centres (TFCs) for online registration have been set up covering all the districts in Tamil Nadu, the counter said.