Mumbai: 12 transgenders among 4.35 lakh CET candidates

This is the first time the CET will have questions from both years — out of the 50 questions, 10 will be from class XI syllabus. (Representational Image)

A TOTAL of 4.35 lakh candidates will take the Common Entrance Test (CET) on Thursday for admissions to engineering and pharmacy colleges in the state, of which 12 have identified themselves as transgender candidates.
From the last academic year, the Directorate of Technical Education (DTE) started allowing candidates to officially identify themselves as transgender. Nine applicants identified themselves as transgender last year. An official from the DTE said that some candidates erroneously mark themselves as the third gender and there was no mechanism to verify the claims made by candidates.

In a bid to make campuses inclusive, the University Grants Commission (UGC) had asked universities and colleges to add transgender as a third gender category in the application form four years ago.

The DTE has seen a 12.9 percent spike in the number of applications this year despite a drop in admissions to engineering colleges over the past few years. Last year, 3.85 lakh applications had been received for 1.38 lakh seats but over 56,000 of them remained unoccupied. Senior officials in the DTE attributed the increase in applications to the efforts to improve the quality of engineering colleges in the state.

While earlier the state-held CET was based on the syllabus of class XII only, this year candidates will be asked questions from the syllabus of class XI and XII. DTE Director Abhay Wagh said that 80 percent weightage will be on the class XII syllabus and 20 percent on class XI.

This is the first time the CET will have questions from both years — out of the 50 questions, 10 will be from class XI syllabus.