About 26,000 students, who cleared the AIEEE-2009 exam, are still on the waiting list due to the recently introduced online counseling. Most of the students who were accustomed to manual counseling, could not undertake the online counseling properly and hence nearly 1,300 seats have remained vacant this year. Besides affecting a year of the students, the vacant seats will cost nearly Rs 9 crore to the Centre per semester.

The future of nearly 1,300 engineering aspirants across the country may plunge into darkness, if permission is not given to fill the vacant seats in the National Institute of Technology (NITs).

NIT Jalandhar Director Moinuddin claimed that the AIEEE admission system was faulty because counseling was conducted online and one needed foolproof and huge infrastructure for such counseling, in the absence of which seats remained vacant. He has even written to the Union HRD Ministry many times and after receiving no response is now writing a letter to the Prime Minister to get the permission to fill the nearly 150 seats lying vacant in NIT Jalandhar.