The Hindu : Front Page : Single window counselling for medical stream

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Thursday, Jun 12, 2008
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Single window counselling for medical stream

Guidelines to be framed within a week for it to be held under one roof

HYDERABAD: Students seeking admission in the courses under medical stream need not go through the harrowing experience of attending different counselling sessions what with the government planning to conduct counselling through a single window as is being done for the engineering courses.

Officials of the concerned departments recently met and approved the idea to save time and money for the students apart from the inconvenience, which forced many a student to opt out of certain courses. A committee has been constituted to frame guidelines for conducting common counselling for Medical, Dental, Ayurvedic, Homoeopathy, Unani, Veterinary, Agriculture, Pharmacy and Biotechnology (For BiPc students) courses. “We have in principle agreed to the idea and the guidelines would be framed within a week,” a senior official told The Hindu.

Till now, counselling for medical and dental courses used to be conducted by the NTR University of Health Sciences (NTRUHS) while the Acharya N.G. Ranga Agriculture University (ANGRAU) handled admissions into B.Sc ( Agriculture) and Veterinary courses separately with different notifications. While admission for Pharmacy (MPC) candidates was clubbed with Engineering counselling, separate counselling was conducted for the Bi.P.C students.

Medical stream students faced tremendous difficulties as they had to apply for each course separately buying applications for every course. With stakes very high in medical and dental courses and the permutations and combinations involved in admissions, students could never gauge their chances in top courses and ended up missing the opportunity. Moreover, counselling was held in different cities for different courses putting additional financial burden. “We have taken all these aspects into consideration to propose common counselling,” the official maintained.

But the government faces some logistical and legal problems as norms for each course differ though admissions are based on EAMCET ranks. The team constituted will now see whether the norms can be modified and, if done, whether they stand legal scrutiny. Once the guidelines are framed and accepted by all parties concerned, new software would be written to make the procedure fool-proof. Officials say the software created by P. Subba Reddy of Osmania University that is being used for Engineering and MBA courses, could be used with certain modifications.

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