The Higher Education Department has started the preparations for mobilizing fresh batch of students for admissions under Prime Minister’s Special Scholarship Scheme (PMSSS) for the academic year 2019-20.In this regard, Commissioner Secretary, Higher Education, Sarita Chauhan chaired a meeting to review the preparations at various levels here at a meeting of concerned functionaries.The meeting was attended by Advisor, PMSSS, Government of India, Special Secretary, School Education Neeraj Saxena, Nodal Principal Jammu, Nodal Principal Kashmir of the Higher Education Department, Director School Education Kashmir and Director School Education, Jammu.During the meeting, a number of decisions were taken regarding preparation for admission and on-line counselling for academic year 2019-20, in the follow-up to the decisions taken in the 22nd meeting of the Inter Ministerial Committee.In order to spread awareness and give closer guidance to the interested and eligible students on the actual conduct of the admission and on line counselling, it was decided that a series of workshops will be held in both Jammu and Kashmir Divisions.
In the first phase, workshop for Principals of 600 Higher Secondary Schools and 34 Principals of Government Degree Colleges where facilitation centres are set up will be held on 30th of January in Jammu and on 14th of February 2019 in Srinagar, for teachers and professors of respective division, at Government Degree College for Women Gandhi Nagar and S.P College Srinagar respectively.It was given out that the 2nd series of workshop will be held for Coordinators of Higher Secondary Schools and facilitation centres of concerned Government Degree Colleges during the 3rd week of March 2019. The third series of workshop for students, parents and other stake holders will be held from 14th April 20129 for 10 days simultaneously with the process of student registration on AICTE portal in order to provide close guidance to the students and their parents in the registration process which will be held tentatively from 10th of April 2019 to 9th of May 2019.Further, it was informed that the State Government sets up facilitation centres for the students to register online on the AICTE portal and also for on line counselling in 34 Government Degree Colleges with good facilities of computers and internet in different parts of the state.
Meeting was informed that from 2019 onwards besides the Government degree colleges facilitation centres will also be set up in the government Polytechnics and schools which are having ICT lab and good bandwidth connection. The list of these centres will be widely publicized before the start of online registration by AICTE.In order to provide quality education and to improve employability of the students, allotments of supernumerary seats are being made in the institutions which are having hostel facility, all 695 institutions in which students have taken admission in the AY 2018-19, all NAAC institutions having CGPA above 3, all NBA accredited institutions, top 100 NIRF institutions, all Government institutions, any other quality institutions, all good institutions of Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Pune and Hyderabad which would otherwise be excluded for not having hostel facility.Further, given the fact that students prefer Civil, Computer Science & Mechanical Engineering and B.Sc Nursing courses over other technical courses, steps are being taken to earmark seats out of the supernumerary seats for the above technical courses.The final list of such institutions and the earmarking of seats will be made available as soon as these are finalised by the AICTE.