Online counselling resumed after technical snag

By Our Special Correspondent

HYDERABAD, AUG. 6. After keeping students who passed EAMCET-2001 on tenterhooks for nearly two days, the technical glitches that dogged the online counselling for admissions to engineering colleges were rectified by officials on Monday. The breakthrough, which came at around 3 pm after sustained efforts by officials supervising the admissions, has now ensured that the admission schedule is right on course. Till Monday night, counselling for 1,000 students was completed as scheduled.

Earlier, the system failure had considerably slowed down the counselling process but did not stop it altogether as EAMCET officials fell back on the manual mode and transmitted the data from one centre to another through e-mail and fax, though involving inordinate delays.

The first-ever online counselling for filling 43,288 engineering seats began simultaneously from 8 am on August 6 at Hyderabad, Visakhapatnam, Guntur, Tirupati and Warangal. Officials had taken two lines on lease from the Department of Telecommunications besides utilising the APSWAN network for video-conferencing between the five centres.

No sooner did the work start than the system threw up problems in transmitting data from one centre to the other. This is a vital link in online counselling since all centres must simultaneously get information about the vacancies available in different streams and colleges after a student makes his choice so that the student who is next in the order of merit can give his or her options. Work was resumed after nearly seven hours and counselling concluded in the early hours of Monday since officials were determined that there was no backlog.

Computer professionals led by Prof. Subba Reddy, who has designed the software for the online counselling system, and CMC officials, who provided the software, were busy yesterday and today repairing the system.

Mr. Krishna Rao, Secretary, Board of Technical Education, clarified that admission of students in the quotas reserved for NCC and Sports had not been completed as reported in these columns as they were slated for the second phase later this month. However, the quotas for physically handicapped and ex- Servicemen had been filled.

Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Section  : Southern States
Previous : Kotla supporters want memo ignored
Next     : MCH polls: BJP averse to alliance with TDP