Under Osmania University rule, merit seats go into quota, rankers stranded

Hyderabad: Many students who wrote the OU Common Entrance Test for admissions into PG courses in government and private colleges are non-plussed as they have not been allotted seats even after securing ranks below 1,000.

A query posted on the Facebook page of Osmania University by Shivakumar Arravolu said, “I got 443 rank in M.Com but did not get any university what is the reason (sic).”

OU director of admissions Ch. Gopal Reddy traced the reason to GO 550 released by the erstwhile undivided AP government, under which seats are first allotted through the open competition.

After this, if a merit student, who is also eligible for reservation, secures a seat in a better college through reservation, he can chose to ‘slide’ to the new college.

However, the seat earlier allotted in the open competition to the reserved category student will continue to be reserved and cannot be released to the open category.

As a result, in some colleges, up to 90 per cent of the seats are allotted to the reserved categories.

Nizam College has 20 open category seats in MA Economics but not a single seat has been allotted to general category students.

An example of this is the MA Political Science course at Arts College in OU. Of the 30 seats, only one general category student got a seat.

In PG College, Jogipet, of the 30 regular seats for MSc Organic Chemistry, only three seats were allotted to general category students.