LANDI KOTAL (Khyber Agency), Aug 30: Shortage of seats at the Government Degree College Landi Kotal has deprived more than 200 students of admission to first year pre-medical, pre-engineering and arts classes.

Enquiries made by Dawn have shown that more than 500 students from Landi Kotal tehsil passed their Secondary School Certificate annual examination 2007, but the college can admit only 245 in four different categories.

When contacted, college authorities said they offered 60 seats each to medical and engineering students while 100 and 25 students were offered admission in the arts and computer science categories, respectively.

Those deprived of admission were referred to the Jamrud and Bara colleges as there was no other government-run or private college in Landi Kotal which has a population of over 100,000 people.

The situation at the Kohi Degree College in Bara and Higher Secondary School in Jamrud is no different as the allotted quota at these institutions is already filled by local students while a good number of students are yet to be enrolled.

The left-out students of Bara and Jamrud staged a protest demonstration on Wednesday, demanding an increase in the seats in all college-level educational institutions in the Khyber Agency.

The three institutions are also faced with a shortage of teaching staff. The Landi Kotal College had a total of 26 staff members for nearly 100 students when it was established in 1975.

Shah Rehman, president of the student union, said the college was upgraded to degree level some 15 years ago and the number of students has also swelled to nearly a 1,000 while the staff number has gone down to 16.

He said that in order to overcome the shortage of teaching staff, the local political administration had some time ago employed contract teachers, mostly locals, on a fixed salary.

He regretted that contract teachers were rendered unemployed after the local administration stopped paying their salaries a few months ago.