COIMBATORE: The craze to enter an engineering college has hit an unprecedented feverish pitch this year with over 2.28 lakh Tamil Nadu Engineering Admission (TNEA 2012) application forms being sold. The number of students aspiring for a seat under the Government Quota through the Anna University’s single window counselling has shot up by nearly 64,000 compared to the previous year.With the State Board students scoring less in Physics and CBSE students faring badly in Mathematics, the increase in the aspirants is likely to heighten the competition as more students would be tied at same cut-off levels.“We began issuing applications from May 11. As on Thursday (last day), a record 2,28,243 forms were sold. Last year only 1,64,245 applications were sold,” TNEA Secretary V Rhymend Uthariaraj said.This year, authorities had suspended the sale of applications for three days as they had run out of stock. In contrast, last year, nearly 55,000 application forms, printed in anticipation of demand, had to be dumped.Analysts recalled that during 2010, the sale of TNEA forms had crossed the two lakh mark for the first time as the Government had waived the tuition fee for first generation professional degree learners. Educationists, however, indicated that there could be a fall in the turnout of aspirants eventually during the counselling.“A small percentage of the meritorious aspirants might drop out of the race as they could get seats in IITs or NITs. Besides, a sizeable number of candidates might back out because of the tough competition in getting a seat in a desired college/course,” an analyst said.Meanwhile, the Anna University is likely to postpone the commencement of single window counselling for BE/BTech courses as the Directorate of Medical Education has extended the last date for receipt of filled in applications for MBBS / BDS courses from June 2 to June 6.The commencement of the first phase of the medical counselling was also shifted from July 2 to July 5.Traditionally, the engineering counselling is kicked off after the MBBS counselling as the cut-off for the latter is higher.“The TNEA coordination committee will meet next week to finalise the date for commencing the counselling. We had originally planned to start the academic counselling on July 9,” Anna University Vice-Chancellor P Mannar Jawahar said.
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