Teaching losing its charm; 47 per cent seats still vacant in Punjab B.Ed. colleges
Kanwar Inder Singh/ royalpatiala.in
Colleges offering B.Ed. courses in Punjab are facing a crisis with only 52.7% seats of seats filled after the final round of counselling for admissions. The centralized counselling for admission to the B. Ed. course for the session starting in 2020 in all colleges of education affiliated to Panjab University, Punjabi University and Guru Nanak Dev University was conducted by Punjabi University, Patiala.
According to Dr. Gurpreet Singh Lehal, co-coordinator of B. Ed. Counselling,12743 students had applied for 21088 seats available in 212 colleges in Punjab offering B.Ed. course and only 11113 seats were filled at the end of the final round of counselling, leaving 9975 or 47.30% of the seats vacant. Even the 5 government colleges, which arehigh in demand, have 29.25% seats vacant. The 15 government aided colleges with 2350 seats have 44.42% vacant seats, while 48.06% seats of the 18,338 seats offered by 192 private colleges could not be filled.
Dr. Lehal further added that 4 colleges: Nancy College of Education, Malwa College of Education, Asra College of Education and Ram Asra College of Education offering 87 seats each for counselling could not admit any candidate, while 27 colleges could not admit more than 25% students and 92 colleges have more than 50% seats vacant. Batala College of Education is the only college which was able to fill all its 87 seats offered for counselling. Other colleges which had filled more than 95% of seats are Inncocent Hearts College of Education Jalandhar,AmanBhallaCollege of Education Pathankot, GuruTeg Bahadur Khalsa College of Education, Dasuya and Lilly Swords Methodist College of Education, Batala. Overall 12 private colleges were able to admit more than 90% students.
Interestingly even though the government colleges were initially in great demand, but none of them could fill more than 75% of their seats. As for example, 325 candidates had opted for their first choice for the 100 seats available in Government State College of Education, Patiala, but only 75 finally took admission in the college, leaving 25% of the seats vacant. The B. Ed. Course is more popular among girls with 86.38% of the candidates taking admission being girls.
Dr. Jasraj Kaur, coordinator of B.Ed. Counselling informed that the colleges have been given the freedom to fill up vacant seats on their own by 27 January 2021 giving preference to the candidates who had already registered with Punjabi University Patiala for admission.
The online counselling was conducted smoothly in a fully transparent manner by the technical team at Punjabi University, Patiala led by Dr. Gurpreet Singh Lehal, Dr. Tejinder Singh Saini, Dr. Ankur Rana and Dr. Jasbir Singh.
January 20,2021
