RGUKT IIIT Admissions Fiasco

The admissions of the prestigious IIITs (International Institute of Information Technologies) of Andhra Pradesh have become a farce, with the government cancelling this year's provisional merit list for the second time yesterday.

IIITs & the Rajiv Gandhi University of Knowledge Technologies (RGUKT) are the initiative of the Government of Andhra Pradesh. RGUKT offers 6 years full time residential integrated Engineering programs at its IIITs for Students who completed their 10th Standard.

RGUKT's mission is to cater to the educational needs of the meritorious rural youth of Andhra Pradesh. However, this year's admissions process is ruining the academic year for many students.

The fiasco started when, earlier this year, AP Government initiated the admissions for 6000 seats of three IIITs: Basara (Adilabad), Nuzivedu (Krishna) Rajiv Knowledge Valley (Kadapa). The institute prepared its first provisional list with non transparent selection criteria.

As the public & press made protests on the widespread malpractices in the selection process, the authorities cancelled the list and declared a new merit based admissions process.

The IIIT results were declared on 1st Aug. But, this list too has many instances where the eligible candidates were not offered admissions.

The state of affairs at IIIT admissions were so pathetic that, the provisional merit list has names of candidates who haven’t applied to the institute.

After a lot of protest over the last couple of days, the RGUKT dean finally cancelled the merit list. This delay in admissions has put the fate of many an aspirant in a limbo, as all other institutes are closing their admissions for the year and the students have to decide whether to join or wait for IIIT results

The irony is that the RGUKT & IIITs, who are supposed to provide IT education, issued a press note that the admission merit list had anomalies due to Database and Programming Problems!!

Home Loans - SBI My Home Mela

The State Bank Of India is running "My Home" Mela this Saturday.

The SBI plans to offer loans at attractive interest rates during this Mela. The SBI My Home Mela will run through the festive season of Aug, Sep and Oct 2009.

SBI offers loans to different segments of customers.
Under its Hi Five scheme, they offer loans upto Rs 5 lakhs, with an interest rate of 8% for the first 5 years.

Under SBI Easy Loan scheme, the bank offers loans upto 50 Lakhs, with 8% interest rate for the first year, then 8.5% for 2nd & 3rd year.

In the SBI advantage Home Loan scheme, the bank offers loans beyond Rs 50 Lakhs at an interest rate of 8% for 1st year and at 9% for year 2 & 3.

Banking Ombudsman - Complaints On Banking Services

Reserve Bank of India (RBI) started the Banking Ombudsman (BO) services to help customers who are not happy with the deficiency of services at any Bank in India.

The Banking Ombudsman helps citizens in resolving complaints related to credit cards, service charges, promises given by the sales agents of banks, but not kept by banks, and delays in delivery of bank services.

Customers who have grievances due to the financial losses incurred by service deficiency of the bank will have to first approach the bank for the redressal of the grievance and mental anguish.

In case, the bank could not resolve the complaint, the customer can approach the Banking Ombudsman. For more details on this service, pl. visit: http://bankingombudsman.rbi.org.in