NEW DELHI: While Delhi University colleges face the problem of over-admissions in certain courses, vacant seats in the reserved categories also remain a worrying point in many of them.
At least 34 BCom (H) seats reserved for the other backward classes (OBC) category at Dyal Singh College and 11 for economics (H) at Ramanujan College were available till December 3, while four psychology seats for economically weaker section (EWS) candidates weren’t taken at Aryabhatta College. Overall, for 61 colleges, as on December 3, approximately 1,800 seats for OBC, 300 for scheduled caste (SC), 2,500 for scheduled tribe (ST) and 1,000 for EWS categories were vacant.
DU announced the third special drive to fill reserved category seats after that and Wednesday was the last date for completing admissions under it. Many principals said they could not get the required numbers and teachers are concerned that the seats will be wasted again.
For instance, the BCom (H) merit list at Dyal Singh College could include just three candidates for its 34 seats. Similarly, at Ramanujan, only five candidates were listed for economics’ 11 OBC seats. S P Agarwal, its principal, said, “We try to draw more candidates so that if one doesn’t take admission, the other one can. But reserved category seats remain vacant.”
The DU panel’s interim report on the admissions had also highlighted how under-admission in the ST category is a concern. However, as per the recent data, vacancy is a problem in the OBC category too. For instance, at Kirori Mal College, 68 OBC seats were vacant, just a little less than 70 for Kashmiri migrants. For the SC category, 33 seats were vacant and 37 for STs. As against the total vacancy of 275, the merit list could include just 72 candidates.
Even in a college like Lady Shri Ram College for Women, 107 reserved seats were empty. At Hansraj, the count was 172. LSR’s merit list had just eight candidates, including one EWS candidate for three psychology (H) seats. Atma Ram Sanatan Dharma College also had 338 reserved-category seats, which also cover people with disabilities.
“We must appreciate that the colleges are sharing the data on the public domain, but efforts should be made to reduce cutoffs substantially on the reserved seats in the first few cutoff lists,” pointed out Naveen Gaur, a physics teacher at Dyal Singh College.
