HYDERABAD: The saga of vacant seats in engineering colleges continues this year, too, with 16,347 seats vacant under the `A' category (Convenor's quota) out of the 64,252 available seats.

Interestingly, 2,330 seats are vacant in the electronics and communication engineering (ECE) stream that generated craze among students and parents. Similarly, 1,719 seats are available in each of the two other sought-after courses — computer science engineering and information technology. Electrical and electronics engineering (EEE) stream with 3,641 vacant seats takes the top spot.

Others are: mechanical engineering (2,481), civil engineering (545), chemical engineering (449), electronics and instrumentation engineering (622), production engineering (111), pharmacy (1,374) bio-medical engineering (327), biotechnology (489) and applied electronics and instrumentation engineering (200). In several other streams, the number is less but quite significant.

`Sub-standard' tag

Officials say a majority of these seats are in colleges that are located in the rural areas that students don't prefer or those rejected as `sub-standard' by students. Nearly, 99,000 seats are on the offer in engineering colleges this academic year, including the ones in minority colleges and management quota.

According to an official, there are more vacancies in the open category — 2,462 (male) and 2,025 (female). Though there is no cut-off mark for SC and ST categories, number of vacant seats, too, is huge. Under the SC category, 3,689 seats are vacant of which 2,271 are for boys and 1,418 for girls. Under the ST category 1,696 seats are vacant.

BC category

The vacancy position among the BC category is also significant. In BC-A category, the number is 891 while it is 1,460 in BC-B category.

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