With the official order of the Tamil Nadu government is expected very soon on providing horizontal reservation even for the state-run school students in professional courses, there was a sudden spurt in the number of applications registering online for both engineering courses during the last week.

The online admissions for the first-year BE, B.Tech, and B.Arch degree courses begin on July 26. Online enrollment was normal till the government announced a horizontal quota of 7.5 percent even in professional courses. Since then the number of registration of the students from government schools has increased.

Higher Education Deputy Director deputy director and Tamil Nadu Engineering Admissions (TNEA 2021) in charge D Purusothaman told DT NEXT on Tuesday that anticipating the implementation of quota for government school students in the engineering admissions this year, applicants were asked to enter the school category while registering for admissions so that the list of state-run students could be taken separately.

Though the official could not reveal the exact number of students from the government schools, who have enrolled for engineering courses till now, however, said it was increased between ten and 20% from the date of announcement of reservation.

"Just one day before the announcement (August 3), the number of student's registration was 1.04 lakh and of the total 74,309 candidates have made the payment", he said adding "usually, little over 10,000 enrollment is expected every day. However, on the next day of the announcement of reservation quota, about 20,000 applications were added".

Stating that the last date of registration of online application was on August, 24, the official said "as on August 10, around 1.40 students have enrolled and more than one lakh applications have made the payment".

Pointing out that last year the total number of students, who had registered for engineering courses, was just about 1.38 lakh, the DOTE official said with still two weeks were left for the last to fill online applications, the number of enrollment is expected to cross more than 1.5 lakh with more government school candidates is likely to enroll.

The official said that if the government issues official orders for the reservation quota or published them in the gazette, the rank list will be prepared accordingly. "The 7.5% horizontal quota will help more than 14,000 students to get engineering seats", he said adding "however, the rank list for them will also be prepared based on the marks they have obtained".