New Delhi: For Delhi University (DU) aspirants who had been unable to gain admission into a desired college this year, this might come as a ray of hope. Colleges at DU are inviting more applications from students for seats that have been left vacant in the Other Backward Classes (OBC) category.

DU officials have claimed that around 10-15 percent of seats in the OBC category are still lying vacant in some colleges and aspirants can apply for these seats. The seats will be opened for admission to all categories of students from August 6 to 16.

This year, 27 percent of the total 54,000 seats offered by DU had been reserved for the OBC category. The seats for OBC amounted to about 14,580. According to deputy dean of students' welfare, Gurpreet Singh Tuteja, more than 1000 seats in the OBC category may still be lying vacant.

These seats would be available to general category students after August 6 when colleges will advertise for the admission procedure. Students would be provided admissions on the basis of merit.

Kirori Mal College and Hindu College have already begun inviting applications for several courses where seats are lying vacant. This also includes the highly sought after B.Com (Honors) course.

Vice Principal M.C. Nahar of Kirori Mal said that they are yet to work out the number of seats that are still lying vacant at the college due to several ongoing withdrawals by students. He added that students who are interested in gaining admission can send their applications by July 25.

The main admission procedure for the University of Delhi, according to its schedule, is supposed to end by August 6, after which the seats that have been left vacant in the OBC category are opened for students from all categories.

Principal Vinay Kumar Srivastav of the Hindu College has said that some OBC seats are available for conversion to general category seats for courses such as B.Com (Honors), BA (Honors), sociology, history, B.Sc. (Honors) in Zoology, Statistics and Chemistry.

He further added that the cutoffs for the vacant seats would be similar to the fifth cutoff list that had been announced earlier.

Tuteja has advised students to not ignore other options as the number of seats available at the varsity are limited and would be generating huge competition. He said that students should not mistake these admissions as "backdoor entries" as the eligibility criteria for admission into the colleges does not really get relaxed.