The admissions in DU are in full swing. The 3rd cut-off list has been released and the admissions continued until July 11. This is the first time that a new category for Reservation i.e. Economically Weaker Section or the EWS quota is being taken into consideration during admissions in the University of Delhi. This quota ensures that 10% of seats in all the government institutions are reserved for the candidates belonging to the General or the Unreserved category having an annual family income of less than ₹8 Lakh. This increases the total percentage of reserved seats to 60%
But has this new category changed anything for the students applying in DU for 2019-20 session?
The cut-off says otherwise. In the first-ever released list for this category, the cut-offs for EWS quota remains quite high, just marginally lower than that of the General category.
“Since EWS students will come from the general category itself, we’ve kept the cut-off the same. It’s a first, we have no clue how many students will take admission in EWS, so we have kept it the same and we’ll see how it unfolds,” said Anula Maurya, the Principal of Kalindi College, in an interview given to the Indian Express.
The General and EWS cutoffs of Kalindi college are the same for all the courses. For example, the BA (Hons) English cutoff is 90% for both categories.
In North Campus colleges also, the situation is almost similar. SRCC is taking admissions for Economics (Hons) at 98.75% for General Category which is just 0.5% higher than the cutoff for the EWS category. Similarly, in Hansraj College, the difference for various courses is just 0.25% between General and Economically Weaker Section quota. This move of the college administrations is being criticised by many students who wished to take admission under the EWS category.
After the orders from Ministry of HRD, Delhi University administration has, for the first time, increased the number of seats in the varsity by 10% to accommodate the EWS category admissions, changing the total number of seats from 56,000 to 62,000 seats. Out of these 62,000 seats, 5,600 seats are reserved for the EWS category. After the first round of admission, only 14% of the seats under this quota were filled. So, how this will unfold in totality and effect admissions remains to be seen.