At least 10 days to go for online admissions to start

After SC verdict, minority and in-house quota seats will be filled first

There is still uncertainty about the Supreme Court's decision in the best-five case. Worse, even after the apex court has given its verdict, it will take some time for the online admission process to begin.




After the verdict, offline admissions in minority institutions will begin first. It will take at least 10 days to fill up minority and in-house quota seats. And then only can the general category students have a go for seats at preferred colleges.

An official from the education department said that minority and in-house quota admissions will begin soon."Once we are over with admissions to these seats, data of vacant seats will be provided to the education department for the online admission process to begin. This has been the trend for the past two years. It helps to avoid confusion over quota seats which are not included in the online process," the official said.

In the minority institutions, 50% seats are reserved for students from the college specific minority community. Also, several junior colleges attached to secondary schools have a 20% quota for in-house students. Not being part of the online process, these quota admissions are conducted offline.

"The race for seats is the most intense for the prestige colleges, most of which are minority institutes. Colleges like HR, Jai Hind, KC, Mithibai, NM, etc, etc, are all minority institutes. Therefore, only 50% of these coveted seats will be available for the open category students," the official said.

He added, "After the quota admissions, the first and second rounds of the online admissions will be for bifocal (subjects like Computer Science and Information Technology in Science stream) courses. The later rounds will be for general Arts, Science and Commerce courses."

There are around 750 junior colleges in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region. of them, 104 are attached to degree colleges. And 54 of these 104 are attached to degree colleges. And 54 of these 104 colleges have minority quotas.

ICSE board also discriminatory: SC

Rakesh Bhatanagar

Amidst utter confusion over the differential criteria adopted for the junior college admissions, the Supreme Court on Monday asked the state government to file an affidavit explaining its decision of introducing the best-five rule for SSC students.

During the two-hour hearing of the case, senior counsel Harish Salve defended the government's decision in bringing out the rule which the Bombay high court had struck down as "discriminatory".

Justices VS Sirpurkar and Cyriac Joseph said they were not keen on examining the board's powers to frame guidelines. However, they were interested in examining the merit of SSC students who passed in all six subjects and ICSE students who passed five subjects out of seven.

The judges felt the ICSE board's system was also discriminatory as one student may study hard and secure a certain percentage, but his other classmates who concentrate only on five subjects and fail in two may score higher marks.

Salve contended there was lack of uniformity in the education sector all over the country. The judges observed that if the dichotomy seen in the best-five case could be resolved by an amendment in law, it would be of great redress to students.

"Students are students. Let's not describe them as their [ICSE] students and our students [SSC]," the court remarked.

Under the policy, an SSC student's top five scores in six subjects are considered while calculating his percentage.