Mita Mukherjee

Admissions to undergraduate courses in West Bengal will not be held through centralised online process this year, state education minister Bratya Basu said on Tuesday.

Like the previous years candidates applying for undergraduate courses will have to separately log into the websites or portals of various colleges for admission.

The announcement came after a meeting between the vice-chancellors of state universities and the education minister.

Basu said after the meeting that the centralised online process had to be deferred till the next academic session because some of the institutions are still not ready with the infrastructure.

“While discussing the implementation of the centralised online admission today, some of the vice-chancellors informed us that they were not ready with the infrastructure for shifting to the new system. They said they would take another five to six months to complete setting up the infrastructure. The ISC and CBSE results will be declared soon, and the institutions will have to start conducting the admissions. We can’t wait for six months. At the same time the new system cannot be introduced if the infrastructure in the institutions are not ready. The government wants to ensure that the admissions are conducted through an error free system. There has been a lot of disruption due to the Covid, so we decided to defer the online centralised admissions till next year,” Basu said after the meeting.  

Basu had announced on June 3 that the college admissions will be held through a single portal from this year. In the proposed system a student would be able to apply to multiple colleges by logging into a single portal instead of going to different admission portals. Counselling of students were also to be held centrally and there would have been only a single merit list.

The government had been planning to shift to the centralised online system to make the admissions transparent, merit-based and prevent students’ unions of respective colleges from interfering into the admissions.

In Bengal students’ unions have been accused of promising seats to less deserving students for money, pressurising colleges authorities to admit students of their choice and collecting money from students for helping them in the admission process.

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