With seats for engineering courses increasing every year, students getting even 60-70 per cent marks get admission. This in turn affects intake of students for pure science programmes.

The central government has taken several initiatives to boost research for programmes at the masters’ level, but with students not coming for programmes at the undergraduate level itself, the government initiative goes in vain.

Realising the need, the varsity has taken a step forward with this initiative.

“The idea is to keep genuine students interested in basic sciences,” said Arun Adsool, acting vice-chancellor of the UoP, who has mooted the idea. “The university will propose it to the executive bodies for clearance once the proposal is drafted,” he said.

The university will provide scholarship and try to give incentives to students for research. “We will also see if we can tap such students at class 10 level,” said Adsool.

The move has been welcomed by colleges. For last few years in S P College, several seats have remained vacant for BSc courses. “Students take provisional admissions to first year BSc until their seat in engineering is finalised. This has been happening for the past 15 years now,” said vice-principal of the college, V M Solapurkar.

“Students should understand that there are very good opportunities for basic science streams as well,” he said. He pointed out that it was a wrong notion that only engineering course provides good career opportunities.

“We have also had good placement record in the past few years. There are opportunities in laboratories like NCL, ERDL and IUCAA.

Students of statistics and mathematics are needed in research and development projects,” he said.