Counselling for polytechnic courses likely to go online

The proposal to move counselling online was put forth forth considering the ground situation where full normalcy has not restored, said senior official from the Higher Education Department, pointing out the struggle the students faced last year to reach Student’s Facilitation Centres (SFC) for certificate verification and counselling. “Most the students who join polytechnic courses will be from Class 10. Therefore, online counselling will be much simpler compared to engineering,” he added. The process would be kept very simple that can be accessed using android mobile phones. “The programme to be created for online admission procedure will have only a few steps for certificate verification, rank list, counselling process and the names of the colleges they are admitted,” he added. The DoTE authorities are trying their best to implement the online polytechnic counselling process this academic year itself, the official said, and added that they were also consulting health experts seeking advice whether it would be safe to conduct physical counselling this year.

He said that the government has established a video conferencing centre at DoTE at a cost of Rs 1.19 crore to meet the growing educational requirements, especially implementing e-governance in all the technical education streams so as to minimise paper works.

At present, there are 51 government, 34 aided, 4 affiliated, and about 400 self-financing institutions, and 14 hotel management and catering technology polytechnic institutions functioning across the State. Every year, about 80,000 students are admitted to these colleges, the official said.