IN the last few months, the Ministry of HRD had begun the spring-cleaning of the Higher Education system.

First, the sanction to prosecute the AICTE, then the acceptance of a Yashpal Committee report, a slew of new bills, and even the ill-advised move to withdraw deemed university status for 44 colleges (look forward to our story on the same in the next issue), all show a certain seriousness on the part of the state. But unfortunately, the state never looks inwards to see if its house is in order.

Images : Sanijib Kr Mukherjee

The GOI, in every communication cites the famous Supreme Court judgement, declaring the 112 teaching shops that came about in Chhattisgarh in 2004 (judgment is displayed on UGC website). The judgement clearly says what constitutes a university (See Box for excerpts from the judgement). To put it crudely, it has a 5-point test; land, campus, faculty, academic diversity and money, and for the court all the elements are equally crucial. If one applies the same standards to most of the newly-announced IITs and Central Universities, then none of them would pass the muster.

As the Supreme Court rightly cautioned, “A University having no infrastructure or teaching facility of any kind would still be in a position to confer degrees and thereby create a complete chaos”. And if not checked, even as they stumble on their way to meet the requirement, these institutions would produce scores of engineers, scientists, graduates and diploma holders. In the case of IITs, at least there is a mentor to provide some academic solace. The students of the new Central Universities do not even have that. We applied the 5-point test to see whether the judgement applied to these universities and IITs. Here is what we found.

In the photograph: CAMP OFFICE of the Central University of Orissa is a flat in this multi-story residential campus. The university operates from this office and has some classrooms as well as infratructure in another rented campus at Koraput.
 

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Eight new IITs
Rewind to August 15, 2007, when the Government announced, “We are setting up five new Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research, eight new Indian Institutes of Technology, seven new Indian Institutes of Management, and twenty new Indian Institutes of Information Technology”. It is now three years after the announcement, and the status of these eight IITs, (see table for the detailed analysis) do not present a pretty picture.

Three out of the proposed eight function from the premises of their mentor IITs. If the mentor IITs, do have such capacity, then they should increase their intake. If they don’t then the students are invariably shortchanged. Barring IIT, Hyderabad, and IIT Patna, no other IIT has recruited faculty. One, IIT Mandi, has just advertised for faculty. The less said the better about land, infrastructure and other essential ingredients that go into the making of great technical institutions. 
 

13 new Central Universities
Here, the situation is much worse. Announced in 2008, the Act was passed in parliament on February 12, 2009. And the Vice Chancellors were appointed by March 1, 2009. Most of them have launched a slew of courses from the last academic session. None of the new universities came on record nor did they allow us to interact with their students. Some of the photographs along side tell there own stories.

Interestingly, only two of the 13 have any information on their academic councils. The quality of a degree, in terms of the structure of the courses, syllabus, delivery and evaluation has to be ideally monitored by the council. In a good university like the JNU, a course would go through a three-stage approval process and a programme (say an MA) would take a four-stage approval.

In the photograph: CENTRAL UNIVERSITY of Jharkhand's campus, though slightly better, is still a temporary arrangement.

Normally it takes a year to develop a course and another to launch it. But none of these seems to apply to these universities. Take the case of the Central University of Tirvarur or that of Kerala. One operates from a commercial tower and another from the District collectorate. Both offer a slew of courses. The camp office of University of Orissa is a flat in a housing colony!

The advertisement of Central University of Tamil Nadu clearly states, “The hostels, detailed course review, fee structure etc would be worked out and intimated to students some time in the future”. How are these degrees any different from the ones offered by those 112 universities, rightly banned by the Supreme Court?

Images : Ramesh Dave

Should the  initial batches of students be subjected to agony, just because our politicians want to announce new initiatives? Hope the Supreme Court takes suo moto cognizance of these violations and puts a stop to admissions in these universities until they meet the norms set by the court adequately. Will the court bite the bullet? 

In the photograph: CENTRAL UNIVERSITY of Gujarat currently operates from these rented premises. It offers cutting edge courses, which even established universities would be hard-pressed to offer. 

camp office of the Central University of Orissa is a flat in this multi-storey residential campus. The university operates from this office and has some classrooms as well as infrastructure in another rented campus at Koraput

Central University of Gujarat currently  operates from this rented premises. It offers cutting edge courses, which even established universities would be hard pressed to offer