Hyderabad: After the bifurcation of erstwhile Andhra Pradesh, the home quota in NITs would be filled with students from their respective states. Andhra Pradesh government considers this to be unfair and unjust since its students would lose a large number of seats.
The Telugu Desam government in Andhra Pradesh has been pressurising the NDA government at the Centre to give AP students some access to the 400-odd home seats in NIT Warangal.
With this, the Union HRD ministry on Saturday wrote a letter to the TS government asking if domicile status can be notified as per Article 371D. This was a process used for admissions in the erstwhile Regional Engineering College, Warangal. But after REC was converted to NIT, the entire state of Andhra Pradesh was considered as a single unit and the home quota filled solely on the basis of merit without any regional quotas. Article 371D is applicable for the purposes of admission to any university within the state or to any other educational institution which is subject to the control of the state government.
“We don’t know why they are asking this question now because Article 371D is not linked to central institutions like NIT,” a senior official in the TS education ministry said. The timing is also surprising considering that the Joint Seat Allocation Authority had last week made it clear that every state that has a NIT will not get seats anywhere else.
