IT for Efficiency

Central counselling for admission to AIEEE courses

National Informatics Centre has provided total turnkey IT solution for the design, development and implementation of the Online Counselling System for admission to professional courses based on AIEEE 2007. The support services of NIC include Software and Network Management, training of Counselling Centre staff at 17 locations across the country, and Operation and Processing of Off-Campus and On-Campus Online counselling.

The objectives of the project were to streamline the admission to professional and technical courses in the country; to solve problems of overlaps and reduce physical, mental and financial burden on students and their parents due to multiplicity of entrance examinations, to allow a candidate to exercise choices for a branch and institutions several times during off-campus on-line counselling; allotment of institution and branch as per the merit of the candidates, online display of vacancy and allotted position to enable more transparency in the admission process and availability of results on the web.

Process
The major activities for accomplishing various tasks of counselling in different phases included, design, development and maintenance of website for counselling, off-campus Online Counselling comprising of Online registration by eligible candidates through web, submission of choices based on the All India Rank (AIR), gender, category, state of eligibility and generation of a tentative seat matrix on regular basis, and on-campus Online Counselling which included Online Payment of Counselling Fees, Online Registration from designated Counselling Centres, allotment of seats, generation of Allotment Letters in triplicate, publishing the result on internet and online admission at the participating institutes. Digital Signature Certificate is used for online user authentication.

Impact
The solution provided a single Window Examination System, compliant with GoI reservation policies. Counselling for AIEEE 2007 was successfully completed, in which 6,50,000 candidates had appeared for the examination, and 40 institutes participated in the process. These included 58 branches for two streams (Engineering and Architecture). As many as, 13,000 seats were filled during counselling at 17 counselling centres.

The solution is both scalable and replicable and allows for customisation of the software as per the other state government reservation policies and can be implemented across the country.