Maharashtra Government Permits 28 Junior Colleges to Introduce Bifocal Programmes

The state government of Maharashtra has permitted a total of 28 junior colleges in Mumbai Metropolitan Region (abbreviated as MMR) to start including bifocal programmes in their curriculum from the academic session of 2019-2020. It is said by experts that this initiative will be favourable to the engineering aspirants.

Bifocal programmes allow the students of science stream to skip the subjects of biology and second language during class 11th and class 12th. Instead of these subjects, they can take 200 marks elective subjects like Computer Science or Electrical Maintenance.

More than around 13,000 students have registered for the bifocal programmes this year, as per the data collected till the evening of 22nd June 2019, Saturday. The first merit list for this programme is expected to be out on 26th June 2019, Wednesday.

Shrenik Kotecha, the trustee of the Lakshya Prep High School and Junior College, said that bifocal programmes help students by lowering their stress levels. Students who are preparing for competitive entrance exams like MH-CET (Maharashtra Common Entrance Test) or JEE (Joint Entrance Examination) benefit from this programme as it enhances their preparation. Kotecha further said that most of the students who prepare for competitive exams also need to score good marks in the HSC exams. This is another reason why they choose bifocal programmes.

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The Lakshya Prep High School and Junior College and eleven other schools with the same name are run by a coaching chain named Mahesh Tutorials. This coaching chain has received the approval of the government of Maharashtra to open them this year and all of these schools offer bifocal programmes.

Experts said that the demand for bifocal programmes has increased in the past few years due to the surge in the number of engineering aspirants every year. Students want to crack the engineering entrance exams and also score well in their class 12th board exams. Subhas Joshi, the trustee of a group of coaching institutes called Science Parivar, said that students can score 180 out of the total 200 in the elective subjects easily and this is what makes them incline towards bifocal courses more.

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Admission in the existing bifocal colleges will be conducted via a centralised system but the admission process of the newly approved colleges will be done at the college level.