Over 260 engineering seats are still vacant at Jadavpur University this year and the number has gone up in the past fortnight as many students have left for institutes they consider to be better.

Veteran teachers of Bengal’s premier engineering college said there was a time when students never thought of quitting JU once they secured admission. That perception has changed.

India now has 23 IITs that offer over 12,000 BTech seats each year. That itself, according to many, is a big draw.

A little more than one-fifth of the BTech seats have remained vacant after the joint entrance examination board had carried out the counselling for the engineering institutes that ended on July 20. JU has 1,273 engineering seats.

The university will conduct counselling on August 16, 18 and 19, respectively, to fill the vacant seats.

A veteran professor said the seats would get filled up through the ensuing round of counselling, but the question on the failure to retain bright students would continue to haunt.

“On the university’s website I saw that BTech aspirants with rank up to 10,000 have been called for filling the seats. But that was not the situation earlier,” said the teacher.

The vacancy cropped up as the BTech aspirants despite being allotted seats through the online counselling did not turn up between July 24 and August 6 to take admission.

A varsity official said that several aspirants who were allotted seats in the coveted departments such as computer science and engineering, electronics and telecommunication engineering did not take admissions and switched to the IITs.

“One of our staff tried to counsel an aspirant who came to the campus to assess the potential of computer science and engineering. As he dropped a hint that he would not take admission at JU, the employee tried to persuade him in taking admission at JU. He said that he would take admission at an IIT that has come up new,” said the official.

Parthapratim Das, a teacher of computer science and engineering at IIT Kharagpur, said it was a matter of concern that seats at JU, which was in the contention for the institution of eminence tag along with IITs and other central institutions, were going vacant.

“I can recall when my son was attending counselling for securing a berth at an engineering institute in Bengal in 2007, I was fervently hoping that he made it to JU. So it is a matter of concern that so many seats are remaining vacant. I am sure that the authorities will probe the reasons,” said Das.

Das admitted that the IITs and NITs were taking away students from JU. “A BTech aspirant might get swayed by the badge of IIT. But one must keep in mind that the companies while making recruitments sound out whether the interviewee is from the older IITs or the newer ones. It is also true that the some of the NITs are performing quite well,” said Das.

Another IIT Kharagpur teacher said JU needed to find out whether some of the disciplines were registering large number of vacancies because of low job prospect. In that case JU should rationalise the seats, he said.

Chiranjeeb Bhattacharya, one of the two pro-vice-chancellors, said they would soon meet to find the reasons behind the vacancies.