Kerala - Kochi

The Hindu show overwhelms Manjeri

Students and parents taken through every process of online counselling

GIVING GUIDANCE: Joint Commissioner of Entrance Examinations S. Rajoo Krishnan interacting with students in Manjeri at a videoconference organised by The Hindu-Educationplus in Thiruvananthapuram on Saturday as part of a pre-counselling session for a dmission to professional colleges in the State. The invited guests who witnessed the programme are seen on the left. - Photo: S. Gopakumar

A pre-counselling guidance session organised by The Hindu-Educationplus at Manjeri on Saturday turned out to be an event for this developing town to cherish forever. Everyone who stepped into Woodbine Auditorium, where the programme took place, on the pleasant morning had a fruitful time.

The students and parents came to the session with an array of questions and doubts about the professional courses and the proposed online counselling.

They were not just from Malappuram and its peripheries. They came even from places as distant as Ambalappuzha. Several of them reached the Malappuram and Manjeri towns the previous (Friday) evening, expecting a useful pre-counselling guidance from a panel of experts.

Their enthusiasm overwhelmed the packed hall, which almost looked bursting at the seams. But no one was turned down, despite an early closure of the registration owing to rush of students awaiting the Centralised Allotment Process.

The student turnout was more than double the number the organisers had expected. It proved that the semi-urban Manjeri and its sister town Malappuram were as serious about professional courses as big towns.

The response sheet filled out by the students showed that no one was disappointed. They got what they wanted - from experts present both in Manjeri and in Thiruvananthapuram. The biggest attraction of the session was the simultaneously interactive video link with the State capital.

At the Thiruvananthapuram end the action hotted up with the arrival of Joint Commissioner of Entrance Examinations S. Rajoo Krishnan and the Technical Director of the National Informatics Centre, Kerala, Prasadu Varghese, whose presentations were all about the nuts and bolts of the new online counselling process.

Mr. Varghese got the game going by demonstrating via video link what the students would see once they logged on to the designated website to be used for this year's counselling.

Simulating an actual computer server on his laptop, Mr. Varghese took the gathering at Manjeri through every process of the new system. He demonstrated how options could be given, how the list can be changed many times over, how the password can be set. The eagerness with which the listening students lapped up the presentation was very much evident at the Thiruvananthapuram end of the video link.

Then it was the turn of Dr. Krishnan, who spoke on the non-technical aspects of the online counselling process.

He lucidly explained to the students such counselling terms as floating seats, the link - or rather the lack of it - between freeships and seats reserved for the SEBC quota, the split-up of seats between various categories in the government and aided colleges and in the self-financing colleges.

The duo patiently answered a range of queries from students and parents at Manjeri.

Mostly off-screen but enriching the programme with their presence were the invited guests at Thiruvananthapuram: former member of the State Planning Board G. Vijayaraghavan; the former director of C-DIT Achuthsankar S. Nair; SIET Director Babu Sebastian; executive director of the IT@School Biju Prabhakar; Dean, Faculty of Sciences, University of Kerala Oommen V. Oommen; and Principal of the Mohandas College of Engineering, Anad, Asha Latha Thampuran. The local panelists were R. Ravindran Nair, Principal, Calicut University College of Engineering; Y.R. Sarma, former Director, Indian Institute of Spices Research; and M. Muraleedharan, paediatrician, Government Hospital, Malappuram.

At the end of the show, everyone - the students, parents, guests and panelists - was all praise for the manner in which the show was conducted and highly appreciative of the core concept of the programme using frontline technology to reach out to semi-urban and rural students.

The event was organised in association with Canara Bank.

G. Mahadevan

Abdul Latheef Naha & G. Mahadevan

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