Engineering College managements have accused the Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University (JNTU) of behaving in a dictatorial manner by cutting seats in top colleges without taking into consideration their objections thus denying an opportunity for students to study in reputed colleges.

In the affiliation process conducted by the JNTU in the last few months, several top colleges also lost seats in key branches such as Computer Science and Electronics for not complying with norms. These include sought-after colleges like VNR Vignan Jyothi, KMIT and Sreenidhi Institute of Science and Technology that lost about 500 seats. Similarly, one of the biggest groups like JBIET was denied almost 1,000 seats.

However, the college managements say the deficiencies were minor and negligible. Correspondent of a top college said JNTU officials went by the first fact-finding commission report and did not take into consideration the second report where the deficiencies were plugged. “These were small mistakes like not attaching the Aadhar card number of some faculty member. Despite showing details of qualifications, experience, selection committee minutes, appointment orders, joining reports and attendance registers, yet JNTU ignored them.”

The university apparently has also not considered cases of teachers who were sent to various faculty development programmes for which the documents were also shown to the first fact-finding committee. In some cases permission was denied if the shortage was limited to just one faculty member, colleges claimed.

“This is against what the Chief Minister has promised to us. He assured us that time would be given to plug minor deficiencies,” said another correspondent, unwilling to be quoted. In some cases, permission was denied if the experimental set ups in a particular laboratory were 10 instead of 12. “Universities usually ask colleges to conduct minimum of 10 experiments out of 12 setups in the lab. But even that was not taken into consideration.”

JNTU could have restrained at least going by the academic achievements of the colleges over the years and why students choose them. “Denial of seats has robbed students of studying in good colleges and it is a loss to not just institutions but also to good students,” argued a senior faculty member. Senior teachers agreed that there are some black sheep in the industry but one can’t judge everyone with the same tool.