CHANDIGARH: The private technical colleges of Punjab have lost over Rs. 170 crore because this time the colleges could not fill 100% seats. This loss has been accrued because of delayed counselling in the admission of various courses such as engineering, pharmacy, architecture, management etc.

On one hand, through out the country, the academic session has started one month back while in Punjab the counselling process has just concluded two days back. Because of delayed counselling, the students secured their seats in colleges of other states. In Punjab, this time more than 7000 seats in various courses are laying vacant resulting into the biggest ever financial loss to the self financed colleges. To discuss this problem, a meeting of PUTIA (Punjab Unaided Technical Institutions Association) was held here today which was attended by chairmen/ directors of around 100 colleges. It was decided in the meeting that association would meet CM S. Prakash Singh Badal and would bring this fact in his notice.

Dr. J S Dhaliwal, Chairman, PUTIA has demanded from the CM to fix the responsibility of the officials who made the faulty admission policy and has demanded a compensation for non filling of the seats in the self financed colleges.

The association earlier also had strongly criticized the faulty admission policy and had demanded for online or a single counselling. This matter was also brought to the notice of CM but the technical education department and Punjab Technical University (PTU) insisted for second counselling. PUTIA said that if single/ online counselling would have been conducted this time, then this situation could have been avoided.

Although 95% of Technical Education in Punjab is provided by private institutions, but while formulating the policy they are ignored totally. PUTIA demanded that the private technical institutions should be given representation in PTU Board of Governors proportionately & also due importance should be given to the association in important policy formulations.

The association demanded from Punjab Govt. that Transport & Electricity Bills should not be charged on commercial basis from the institutions and should be provided at discounted rates. Punjab Govt. has also notified that no stamp duty would be charged upon registration of land from the educational trusts. But there is a need of strict implementation of this notification, which has not been done so far. The association also criticized the decision of Punjab Technical University of demanding Rs. 2500 per student as counseling fee, even for the students under the management quota. It also demanded to withdraw the heavy fines put up by PTU on private colleges without any further discussion.

Also present in the meeting were, Dr. Zora Singh (Desh Bhagat Group; Dr. Rohin Sachdeva (Lala Lajpat Rai Group; Satnam Singh Sandhu (CEC, Landran Group); Gurvinder Singh Bahra (Rayat & Bahra Group); Anshu Kataria (Aryans Group);Manjeet Singh (Doaba Group); Avtar Singh (Sukhmani Group); Sukhdev Singla (Indo Global Group); Hakam Singh Jawanda (Bhai Gurdas Group); Manmohan Garg (SVIET); Jagdish Singh Garcha (Former Technical Education Minister, Punjab) and many others.