Hi anwar01, thanks for your views.
Wanted to ask you that since It's clear now that they had nominations quota left all this time yet they held up issuance of nominations to all those waiting since mid - September. Why?? I did not see that they held Nominations, every week I am seeing candidates are getting Nominated, I think this week I saw 3 or 4 candidates on forum who got Nomination. Yes I Agree, Processing time has been increased substantially since August 2017 but nobody knows why. One Possible reason is backlog but again all we can do is speculate, until OINP tells us the reason itself.
They opened masters stream today and within an hour or so closed it again.
It seems that they want to use their left over quota for other streams and not HCP, even though many applicants are waiting at DIP stage. There is a reason for not opening HCP, You might remember the week of 26th June 2017 when NOI were given to ICT candidates with less then 400 CRS. This was a pleasant surprise for such candidates and they applied without any delay. This caused a surge of application which they have mentioned in their update page too! It caused OINP portal to break down for a couple of days. These high number of applications consumed all quota for HCP as well as caused Backlog.
Do you think they have enough quota left to accommodate all HCP applicants - waiting and new registrations they are taking under other streams? As you know there are 8 different streams under OINP, so they have to allocate quota to all of them. If they opened MS & PhD stream, they might have some Nomination quota left for these streams. But again, its a speculation, no solid data available anywhere how much quota is given to these 8 streams out of 6000. But one thing is sure, HCP is the most popular one and it would be consuming the big Chunk of Quota.
I posted this same query to BillHyatt in some other thread.....waiting for his feedback.....