46K students apply for FYJC seats on Day 1 of special round

Most of the vacant seats are in lesser-known and in aided colleges.

The education department received 46,608 applications on Monday, the first day of the special round for online admissions to first-year junior college (FYJC). This round is open to all those who want to apply for admissions, including those looking to change their seats, those who haven’t claimed the allotted seats, ATKT students and first-time applicants.

Education department officials expect the number to rise to over a lakh over the next two days. The competition will be intense in this round as there are only 1.4 lakh seats vacant. “Another 50,000 are expected to apply on August 9 and 10. We might hold more rounds if there are vacant seats,” said BB Chavan, deputy director of education, Mumbai region.

“We will review the situation on Tuesday. If there is a lot of crowd, we will postpone the deadline by a few days so that no student is left out,” added Chavan.

Most of the vacant seats are in lesser-known and in aided colleges. The fees for an aided seat subsidised by the government is much less compared to an unaided seat. For instance, the fee for a seat in the electronics course in Ruia College, Matunga, aided divisions, is Rs1,200, but the fee for the same course in unaided divisions is Rs25,000. Colleges are unable to understand why students are not opting for these seats. “There seems to be a discrepancy in the online system as our aided seats are still vacant,” said Kavita Rege, principal, Sathaye College, Vile Parle. There are nearly 70 to 80 seats lying vacant in their aided divisions in the arts and science streams, while around 30 to 35 are unfilled in the commerce stream.

An association of 60,000 junior college teachers blamed this on the department indiscriminately increasing seats on self-financed (unaided) basis. This year, the department approved nearly 11,000 new unaided seats, but the number of aided seats is unchanged.

They met education minister Vinod Tawde on Monday and demanded a separate round only for aided seats next year. “In this admission round, we saw that high-scoring students got unaided seats, while low scorers got aided seats,” said Anil Deshmukh, joint secretary of the association.