10/19/2010 www.indianexpress.

com/story-print/48…

Print Close Window

OBC seats still vacant at Delhi colleges

hamari jamatia Posted online: Tue Jul 14 2009, 02:06 hrs
New Delhi : Colleges all over Delhi University have failed to fill up seats reserved for students from the Other
Backward Classes despite reducing cut-offs for this category to 10 per cent below the last general category cut-
offs.

Approximately 16,000 OBC students had applied for 10,183 seats at the university this year. However, not many
students from this category had marks above 80 per cent and the cut-offs for them cannot be relaxed to more than
10 per cent below the last general category cut-offs.

Also minor glitches keep cropping up in DU. Seema M Parihar, Deputy Dean of Student Welfare, says some
OBCs from Assam were recently given ST status by the state. Now, neither do these ST status recipients have
an ST certificate, nor do their names figure in the OBC list. Hence, they have not been given admission.

“It is also important to note that many OBC students take admission in the general category. Hence, the number
of empty seats may not be all that telling,” Parihar says.

Pragati Mohapatra, admissions convener at IP College for Women, says the lack of hostels is also a big
discouragement for aspirants. There are not enough college hostels in DU and for outstation OBC students that is
one of the biggest concerns.

“While college hostels have reservation for SC/ST students, the same is not true for OBC candidates, who are
given hostel seats based on merit. Considering the fact that general category students usually have higher marks,
OBC students lose out,” she says.

In colleges like College of Vocational Studies, Daulat Ram College, Sri Venkateswara College and IP College,
seats in many subjects are still empty. At Venkateswara for example, there are 197 seats reserved for OBCs but
only 159 admissions have taken place after the fourth cut-off list. At IP College, only around 40 students have
taken admission from more than 90 seats.

Nirmal Kumar, admissions convener at Venkateswara, points to the fact that DU only considers OBCs from the
Central list for admissions. Hence, while Jats are considered OBC in the State list, they cannot apply under the
category in DU because the Central list does not consider them to be so.

“If Jats were included in the Central list, I am sure there would have been many more people coming in for
admissions,” he says.

Admissions in DU will continue till August 16, so OBC students still have a chance. On August 16, when
admissions close, colleges will be sending the statistics of the seats remaining to the university, which will then
decide what to do with them. For now, however, going by court rulings, DU has decided to convert empty OBC
seats to general category seats.

indianexpress.com/story-print/488980/ 1/1