Friday, 05 February, 2010
Says They Were Not Given Enough Opportunity

Chennai: Taking a diametrically opposite position from that of the union human resource development ministry’s stand on derecognising blacklisted deemed universities, the chairman of the parliamentary committee on HRD, Oscar Fernandes, on Thursday argued for granting grace time for these institutions to make up their deficiencies.

“We need to tell them (the 44 blacklisted deemed universities) where they are deficient and see that they improve and come up to the level of institutions that can be recognised (as deemed universities). They should be given time to make up for the deficiencies,” Fernandes said in an informal interaction with journalists here. Fernandes, who was in Chennai to inaugurate an education summit organised by the Confederation of Indian Industry (Tamil Nadu) and principally sponsored by private deemed universities, did not favour instant action against institutions found severely deficient in terms of academic and physical infrastructure.

“I am making a statement on the basis of the representation of some of the deemed universities that they were only given an opportunity to make a 10-minute presentation (before the four-member expert team constituted by the ministry) and not reply (to the charges of deficiencies). So they should be given an opportunity,” he said.

The committee had faulted few deemed universities which were just one year old for not having good research output. “In one year what research can anyone do,” Fernandes said. VIT chancellor and CII TN education panel convenor G Viswanathan reasoned that instead of penalising all deemed universities, the officials must identify institutions which were massively violating rules and penalise them. “One deemed university had admitted 1,500 PhD scholars, you take action against such institutions. In each deemed university there is a representative of the HRD ministry and the UGC. They should locate the bad universities and take action,” he said.

Viswanathan called for greater competition among both government and private universities so that quality could be infused into the higher education system and also the cost of education could be reduced. “In no other country do you have a uniform fee structure. Even in India, the fees for engineering colleges varies from state to state. There has to be competition among institutions and fees should be fixed based on the location and facilities provided in each college,” he advocated.