By Mehboob Inamdar
Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar: The popularity of the Diploma in Pharmacy (D Pharm), a post-HSC polytechnic course, started witnessing a decline for the first time during the last several years.
It may be noted that D Phramcy was in high demand among students on completion of HSC after medical and engineering courses until 2022. The reason is that youths get jobs as pharmacists in druggists and chemistry shops or they themselves can become self-employed.
D Pharmacy has been in high demand since Covid outbreak compared to the Engineering and Technology diploma and other post-HSC courses.
There are 9,117 seats in 32 polytechnics which offer D Pharmacy courses in eight districts of the region for the current academic year.
Of them, 25 per cent (2,300) seats remained vacant at the end of three Centralised Admission Process (CAP) rounds and one institute-level round conducted by the Directorate of Technical Education for the academic year 2023-24. There were 6,540 seats in 104 D Phramcy colleges of the region until October 2022.
Talking to this newspaper, joint director of Technical Education (Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar) Dr Umesh Nagdeve said that nearly 2,300 seats remained vacant this year. He said that one of the reasons for the vacant seats is the rise in D Phramcy polytechnics.
He said that the course is in demand as candidates get jobs or self-employed immediately on the completion of the course in the post-Covid situation. “One gets admission easily if one has passed HSC with Physics, Chemistry and Biology or Mathematics in stream,” he added.
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Reasons of decline in popularity
Taking into the demand, the education societies submitted proposals to the State Government during the last three years. The DTE received more than 50 proposals from the education society since 2020. With the permission of the Pharamcy Council of India, around 30 D Pharamcy colleges got approval if the data available DTE is to be believed. The polytechnics which offer the D Pharmacy courses mushroomed in the different parts of the region. This gave rise in seats and so is the case with shops of druggists and chemists.