Delhi University colleges just can’t fill up EWS seats

NEW DELHI: Delhi University colleges are struggling to fill their seats under the EWS category which was introduced this year. An analysis of the admissions done at the end of the second list shows that even in courses where there are just two seats for the category, only one or none has been filled.

At Indraprastha College for Women, only one of the seven seats in political science (Hons) has been filled.Similarly, no admissions have taken place at LSR in popular courses like psychology and English, which have two and four seats, respectively, in the EWS category.
At Miranda House, not a single EWS applicant has been admitted in economics, English, history, physics and botany courses. Barring botany, the cutoff for all these courses is higher than 95% even in the third list. At Kirori Mal College, courses like English, Hindi, BCom, statistics and zoology have had no admissions as the cutoffs are as high as 96.75%.
At IP College, where admissions in psychology (Hons) in the general category were closed after the second list, the cutoff for EWS is 96.75% in the third list, which is quite high as compared to the 92.5% for OBC.
With high cutoffs for EWS applicants, colleges said they might have to carry out a special drive to fill the seats in the third list. “There will be a special drive for students of the reserved category, including EWS, after the fifth cutoff list,” said RK Dwivedi, admission-in-charge at Aryabhatta College.
The officiating principal of Kamala Nehru College, Kalpana Bhakuni, said, “Colleges should have kept the cutoff for EWS lower. High cutoffs are not helping such students in any way. We wanted to keep the cutoff low, so we reduced it by 1% in every subsequent cutoff list. Despite this, the admissions have been slow.” At Kamala Nehru College, the three EWS seats each in psychology and economics are still vacant.
However, it seems high cutoffs are not the only factor to blame for the low admissions. At colleges like Ramjas and Dyal Singh, even in courses like Hindi and Sanskrit that have cutoffs as low as 56% there have been no admissions.
“OBC non-creamy and EWS quota are governed on the basis of family income, so why isn’t the cutoff for both categories similar?” asked Deeksha Jha. She has bagged a seat at Laxmibai College, but was hoping to get admission in either Kamala Nehru or Gargi College.
Meanwhile, in stark contrast to Delhi University, there is a huge difference between the cutoffs for the unreserved and EWS categories at Ambedkar University Delhi (AUD), which released its first list on July 9.
In courses like English honours, there is a difference of more than 10%. While it is 96.25% for the general category, EWS students need just 86.75%. AUD vice-chancellor Anu Singh Lather said, “Since we received applications from EWS students with lower marks, we kept the cutoff in that range.”