Low attendance in the ongoing counselling sessions has emerged as a threat to the minority colleges in the state.

After ruling the education sector for several years, minority professional colleges are now struggling to get students.  There was a time when the managements of minority professional colleges had taken a confrontationist stance towards the government. Now their representatives are making rounds of the higher education department for admissions under government quota.

They had also gone to court to assert their right to make their own admissions and had also got a favourable verdict, following which Muslim and Christian minority colleges have been conducting admissions on their own for the past few years.

While Muslim institutions made admissions on the basis of entrance exams conducted by the government, the Christian minority institutions conducted their own entrance test this time.
There are three single windows for conducting admissions into professional colleges in the state. SW-I handles the entrance exam and admissions counselling conducted by the government, SW-II relates to admissions for Muslim minority colleges and SW-III is for Christian institutions. This year, the Christian minority colleges conducted their own entrance test, braving opposition from government officials. The institutions cited the apex court's judgement which ruled that the minority institutions can conduct their own exam.

However, their initiative backfired as hardly 1,000 students turned up for exams for admissions into engineering, MBA and MCA courses. While there are 10 Christian minority engineering colleges, there are 60 MBA and 60 MCA colleges. In all, there are around 3,000 engineering seats, about 3,000 MBA seats and 2,000 MCA seats.

These colleges conducted their own counselling for all the 8,000 seats. But they could fill only 1,000 seats and the remaining 7,000 seats are still lying vacant, pushing the colleges into crisis. With no other options, these colleges appe aled to the government to fill up their vacant seats in SW-I counselling. This has created a rift between minority and non-minority colleges. With poor response to the ongoing Eamcet SW-I counselling with as many as 81,000 qualified students absent, the managements of non minority colleges fear they will be at a loss if minority colleges too are included in SW-I at this stage.

On Friday, representatives of the colleges quarrelled in front of the AP State Coun cil of Higher Education.The officials then backed out on their decision to include minority colleges in the SW-I counselling owing to strong opposition from the non-minority colleges.

"How can the minority colleges seek inclusion in SW-I after securing appr oval for conducting their own admissions?" asked Mr Rajeshwar Reddy, general secretary of AP Engineering Colleges Association. "If they are included at this stage, the loss will be ours."

He said with the govern ment permitting over 600 colleges, the number of seats had gone up to 2.02 lakh in just SW-I convenor quota and there are no takers for them.

However, minority col leges argued that including 7,000 seats in SW-I will not make much of a difference.Mr K.V.K.Rao, chairman of St Mary's Group of Insti tutions. "If they offer better facilities, why should they worry about us?"