The Hindu : Andhra Pradesh / Hyderabad News : One-stop shop software

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Tuesday, Jul 22, 2008
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Andhra Pradesh

Andhra Pradesh - Hyderabad

One-stop shop software

Brainchild of OU Computer Sciences professor, the software incorporates all combinations and permutations

P. Subba Reddy

HYDERABAD: The first impression a student gets about engineering makes an impact on the entire course. And this is made at the counselling stage itself. At the stroke of one key, options cutting across colleges, courses, categories, regions and religions are displayed on the screen reflecting how engineering stream makes life so easy.

Thousands of students attending engineering counselling every year are amazed at the fool-proof software used in the process to allocate seats to them. Every single entry searches nearly 50 combinations like four regions, eight castes, three religions, two equations based on gender, 15 branches of courses, double payment seats, and six other horizontal reservations like CAP, physically-challenged, NCC, NSS, sports in which the student might appear and throws up the right options available. And the man behind this amazing software is P. Subba Reddy, Professor of Computer Sciences in Osmania University.

He single-handedly developed this software that is now a model for majority of the States in their counselling for admission into professional courses. In fact, even within the State, the same software is now being adopted for admissions into medical colleges, MBA and MCA colleges, B.Ed colleges, Polytechnics, Architecture apart from all other CETs conducted by the State government. Now even the fee collected by banks is also linked to this software.

Complicated

Counselling in the State is always complicated because of some unique factors like local, non-local reservations, gender reservations within the categories and the 550 G.O. that ensures that reserved category students benefit twice. This year, he has also incorporated the changes needed for web-based counselling that allows students to change their options sitting at home. The software is written in “C” language with some Java applications. “It took a month initially when I first wrote the software in 1996 but now the changes hardly take any time,” says the soft-spoken professor.

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