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Over 53,000 seats remain vacant in engineering colleges at the end of a month of counselling through single window system of admission.

In the last few days of counselling at the Tamil Nadu Engineering Admissions (TNEA) 2011, the percentage of students absent has been above 30 on an average and climbing up by one percentage point every day.

At the end of counselling on Monday, 1.26 lakh students were called for the single window admission out of which 95,615 were allotted seats. As many as 38,897 failed to turn up while 283 skipped. Only two students were rejected. On Monday, the absentee rate was 35.57 per cent. At the end of the month, the average rate of absentees is 24.37 per cent. “The percentage of absentees could go above 25 per cent at the end of counselling,” says Prof. Mannar Jawahar, Vice-Chancellor, Anna University. Counselling under academic stream ends on August 11.

A 25 per cent absentee rate could mean 36,000 seats falling vacant. Of the 53,404 seats remaining vacant as on Monday, 52,615 seats were in self-financing colleges.

There were 788 seats waiting to be filled in constituent colleges of five Anna Universities of Technology (AUT) as the government’s merger plan is yet to be announced. In government and aided colleges, only one seat was available under SC Arundhathiar quota. Last year, the number of applications was 1.60 lakh and the intake was 1.20 lakh students of which 1.12 lakh were admitted and 8,000 seats fell vacant.

This year, the number of applications is 1.50 lakh, including students from the vocational stream. Under the academic stream, 1.44 lakh will be participating in the counselling. And the admission intake this year has equalled the number of applicants at 1.44 lakh with new colleges and more courses in existing institutions added to the single window admission. “We expect 1.10 lakh students to join engineering this year,” says Prof. Rhymend Uthariaraj, secretary, TNEA 2011.

As many as 36 new engineering colleges have joined the single-window admission this academic year.

Apart from this, the self-financing colleges have been surrendering seats from the 75,000 seats available under the management quota which could push the number of vacant seats in engineering this year above 40,000, say officials.