Chennai: Madras High Court has declined to accede to prayers that the method of submission of written application should also be continued during the engineering admission for the academic year 2018-2019.
A division bench comprising Justices V. Parthiban and P.D. Adikesavalu passed the interim order on public interest litigations filed by DMK MLA CVMP Ezhilarasan and advocate P. Ponpandian.
“We are convinced that the method of online registration of applications, having been tested for the two immediate previous years and found to be successfully accepted by the public, the restriction to that mode alone from the year 2018 onwards would not result in any deprivation of opportunity to the eligible students to apply for admission. As a matter of fact, it is actually beneficial to the applicants by virtue of the decentralisation of the entire process and enabling the facility of undergoing admission process in a transparent manner without the requirement to travel all the way to Chennai from different places across the state,” the judge said
The bench said it has been agreed by the authorities concerned to include demand draft in the modes of receipt of application fee and an affidavit has been filed by the Secretary, TNEA, Anna University, stating that the additional DD module for payment of gateway will be available at the TNEA facilitation centres from May 18 onwards after completing testing validation and security check for its inclusion.
The bench said it has been assured that a trained personnel would be available for every computer system at the TNEA Facilitation centres to assist the candidate to fill in the online application till successful registration, if all requirements were duly satisfied, and that there would be a supervisor at every TNEA Facilitation centres to oversee and supervise the functioning and instantaneously resolve any difficulty that may arise at those TNEA facilitation centres.
Directing the Anna University to file a compliance report, the bench posted to June 8 further hearing of the case to further monitor the admission process taking place.
TNEA to accept registration fee through demand draft
Following the court’s order, the Tamil Nadu engineering admissions committee announced that it will accept registration fee for online engineering counselling through demand draft on Thursday.
“As per the directions of the Hon’ble high court of Madras, the payment of online registration fee by way of demand draft will also be accepted in addition to online payment through debit card, credit card and net banking,” TNEA said.
It further said the demand draft will be accepted only at TFCs from May 18. The demand draft should be drawn in favour of “The Secretary, Tamil Nadu Engineering Admissions, Anna University, payable at Chennai on or after May 10.”
The general category students have to pay Rs 500 as registration fee, students from SC, SC(A) and ST categories need to pay Rs 250. Students from special reservation category should pay Rs 100 as registration fee.
A day after plus-2 results were announced, over 11,000 students applied for engineering counselling on Thursday almost double the number of applications received on Wednesday.
In total, around 90,000 students have applied for online counselling of which 15,000 CBSE students yet to complete their registration process as they are awaiting class 12 results.
Still, a majority of candidates are applying on their own and only 10 per cent of students alone coming to TNEA’s facilitation centres.
