Puducherry: A team of University Grants Commission (UGC) would visit Pondicherry Central University from Monday for five days to probe complaints of financial, administrative and academic irregularities. UGC has recently ordered an audit of 10 central universities, including the Pondicherry Central University, at the behest of the HRD Ministry to enquire the alleged irregularities.
Pondicherry University will be inspected by a panel with IIT-Madras professor Shripad Karmalkar, Maharshi Dayanand Saraswati University VC Kailash Sodani, Guwahati University professor Mazhar Asif and Professor Sankarshan Basu of IIM Bangalore as members. The committee will be examining the results or marks secured by students, quality of research activities and corresponding outputs, placement trends and records frequency of review of courses, the introduction of new courses, relevance of current campus research among others, to submit the report.
The university administration maintained that the committee is assigned to assess the growth of the University and future plan for the next three years. “The committee will be examining the existing facilities, visit departments, interact with different stakeholders and then submit a report to UGC for the financial support. An expert committee will also visit Pondicherry University campus at Karaikal,” an official press release from the university said.
The UGC has cut its funding by Rs 2 crore for 2016-17 for not following the rules and regulations in appointments, promotions, fixing pay scales and other academic and administrative matters.
A major section of the academicians is of the opinion that positions like vice-chancellor, registrar, controller of examination, finance officer, 3 statutory posts of directors and deans for the last 2 years have led to the decline of academic standards.
“From this prestigious University that receives huge funds, only 337 students got a placement through campus interviews in 2015-16 and 253 students were selected for higher studies. There are about 4,000 students pursuing postgraduate, postgraduate integrated and PhD programmes in the university. The university failed to introduce any innovative teaching methodologies and the project cell is almost defunct. All these will come in front of the committee,” said a senior faculty member of the University.
“Pondicherry University has planned to project for additional funds to the tune of 147 crores of rupees to sustain the present facilities and also for future plans. The university would submit a detailed report to the expert committee to highlight the need for more financial support to start these new courses and other facilities for overall development of the institution”, said the official release.
