Students asked to submit kin's death certificates for admission

Have you ever heard of students being asked to submit a death certificate as one of the essential documents to procure admissions? It may sound weird, but it's true.

Around 500 students didn't take admission for Class XI in the colleges that they were allotted a pot in, citing the death of close relatives as the reason. Hence, the Centralised Admission Committee (CAC) has asked them to submit the death certificate today to check their claims, and only after receiving a copy of the certificates will CAC consider accommodating them in seats left vacant after last week's admission procedure.

Matter of life and death: The admission committee believes the students are buying time to seek admission in colleges of their choice by giving this ‘excuse'. Representation pic

The admission committee believes that the students are buying time to seek admission in the college of their choice by giving this ‘excuse'. Therefore, to put an end to this, theu00a0admission committee came up with this idea.

Speaking to MiD DAY, Deputy Director of Education (Pune division) and CAC chairperson Suman Shinde said, "We have observed that many
students have deliberately not taken admission at the allotted institute, as it wasn't the college of their choice. Now many are approaching us for admission claiming that they failed to do so because someone dear had died."

About 1 per cent of the total 50,000 students haven't taken admission anywhere yet.

CAC is also keeping a close eye on admissions in junior colleges that admit students under the management quota. "As per the rules, no college can keep more than 5 per cent of total seats for management quota. We are conducting audit of all the 179 junior colleges in the city. It will be repeated on November 15 and April 15, 2014 to check if colleges have flouted the rule," Shinde said.

Remedy
Explaining the loopholes that existed in the system till last year, an official from the CAC said, "As the number of seats for Class XI are less than the total number of applications, CAC used to permit colleges to add 10-15 per cent extra seats to their total strength. Most colleges would sell these seats at higher prices. From this year, they won't be able to do so."u00a0