CHITRAL, July 20: The number of students seeking admission to the first year class in the colleges has registered a drastic drop compared to the previous years when the colleges had to start evening shift to accommodate the growing number of students. The data gathered by this correspondent from colleges of the city reveal that the number of candidates seeking admission to the government colleges had dropped by over 50 per cent.

An official of a government college said that last year the college had received over 1,200 applications for first year class while this year the number of applicants was 543. He said that earlier when a large number of candidates failed to get admission the members of provincial and national assemblies from Chitral approached the government to sanction additional seats.

The first choice of students, both boys and girls, is to get admission in government colleges due to their nominal tuition fee and other charges.

There are three government colleges in Chitral, one each for boys and girls for general education and a commerce college for boys, which normally accommodated about 5,000 students in different disciplines.

An official of another college said that this year they had not received any application for the evening shift. He recalled that dozens of students were deprived of admission last year even in the evening shift.

Meanwhile, the situation is not much different in the private colleges as they had also registered sharp drop in the number applicants for admission to the first year. A principal of a private college for boys said that he had admitted over 50 students by the third week of July last year, but this year very few students contacted them for admission.

Giving reasons for the fall in number of college students, a teacher of a private college, Ghufran Ali, said that the rising prices of essential commodities had crippled the people economically, who could not afford to send their children to colleges.

He said that less number of admissions in colleges also indicated the high rate of dropouts, as 10,000 of the total 15,000 students in the district had passed the secondary school examinations this year.