Governor loses chancellor’s post

Hyderabad: The Governor will no longer have any role in Telangana state universities. Through an executive order, the TS government on Friday stripped the Governor of chancellorship of universities and also took away his powers to appoint vice-chancellor of varsities.

From now on, the government will appoint chancellors to all varsities and select vice-chancellors. The TS government modified the legislation pertaining to all varsities in the state though, in practice, all executive orders were passed by the government in the name of the Governor.

The AP Universities Act, which covers the Osmania University, Kakatiya, Telangana, Palamuru, Satavahana and Mahatma Gandhi universities, has been modified along with the JNTU Act, Jawaharlal Nehru Architecture and Fine Arts University Act, Potti Sreeramulu Telugu University Act, B.R. Ambedkar Open University Act and Rajiv Gandhi University of Knowledge Technologies Act.

Prior to the modifications, Section 10 of AP Universities Act read: “The Governor of the Andhra Pradesh shall be the chancellor of every university.” This has now been modified to, “The chancellor shall be appointed by the government for every university.”

Additionally, sub-section I of Section 11 has been modified to: “The search committee shall submit a panel of three persons to the government in alphabetical order and the government shall appoint the vice-chancellor from the said panel.”

However, officials say that these two changes, effected from Friday, are modeled on the Gujarat Universities Amendment Act, which had stripped the Governor of powers over universities.

“Gujarat’s law was brought in by Narendra Modi himself. So we don’t think there will be opposition from the Centre now,” a senior official in the TS education ministry said.

The eligibility of a person to be appointed as chancellor, however, has not been specified yet.