Just 30 students manage to register on Mumbai University's website

The Mumbai University began its centralised pre-admission online registration process for the first year degree faculties yesterday, and students were troubled on Day 1 as the server crashed.

While the university has maintained that there were problems due to excessive load on the first day, but the website continued to function, senate members have raised questions on the varsity's last minute changes in the technical service provider of the online system.

By the end of the day, only around 30 students could register on the system. Leeladhar Bansod, deputy registrar and PRO of the varsity, in a statement issued in the evening, said, "When the website was opened today (Tuesday), total over 1 lakh candidates visited it at one time to register. Due to this overcrowding, the website slowed down. But to avoid any such issue in future, the university will initiate five new dedicated servers to handle the pressure in addition to the existing 12 servers working for it."

Senate members and senior officials from the university however, have pointed to last minute changes by the varsity administration for the glitch. A former senate member, Santosh Gangurde, said, "First of all, the varsity made last minute changes in the technical service provider in much haste. We had a set process. If there had to be a change, it could have been done for the next academic year so that there could have been time to have a pilot run. Why there was such hurry to give the contract to a lesser known technical company has to be questioned."

A senior official from the varsity, however said, "This happened because there was a delay in the beginning of the process. Lakhs of students have been waiting anxiously for the process to start, as it has almost been a month since the Std XII results were declared. So when the process began it got excess crowd."