Tamil Nadu may cut engineering counselling period to begin academic year earlier

CHENNAI: In a bid to save time, the Higher Education Department is mulling to trim the counselling period for Tamil Nadu Engineering Admissions (TNEA) and to start the academic activities much earlier in 2025 compared to the previous year.

Every year the Directorate of Technical Education (DoTE) has been entrusted to conduct single window engineering counselling for Anna University and the admissions for various BTech and BE undergraduate courses for more than 430 affiliated colleges across the State.

The total number of engineering seats available for this year will be around 1.7 lakh and it is expected that more than two lakh engineering aspirants were likely to participate in the counselling. Accordingly, the engineering admission notification will be given by the DoTE as soon as the Class 12 board exam results are announced.

A senior official from the DoTE, seeking anonymity, said that there won’t be changes in the timing of the one-month duration of enrollment and the gap period of assigning random numbers for the students. “However, publishing of rank list is expected to be declared a little earlier so that the counselling could be started at the second week of July after grievances redressal,” he added.

Pointing out that the engineering counselling in 2024 spanned from July 22 to September 11, the official said this year the time duration especially for the counselling might be reduced to save time as every step of the engineering admission process is online. “A few years ago, the whole engineering counselling process was manual and physical,” he noted.

However, the official also clarified that the thought of trimming the period of TN engineering counselling is at the initial stage. “There are various stages to process this new proposal, including getting approval from high level authorities,” he added.