Patna: The eagerly awaited meeting of vice-chancellors of the state universities and officials of the education department apparently failed to cut much ice on Monday, with both sides sought to offer their grievances with each other and solutions to the issues raised remained elusive.
The meeting was convened on the orders of Patna High Court to resolve the stand-off between the state universities and the education department, which has been continuing for past several months. The court had intervened and called for the meeting at a neutral venue after a few staff of various universities had challenged the government’s order to freeze operation of their bank accounts.
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Additional chief secretary (education department) K K Pathak, whose actions had often led to the confrontation between the government and the governor office, skipped the Monday’s meeting on the plea of being sick. At the meeting, education department officials said that Pathak was unwell. The education department’s ACS did not also attend the meeting called at the Raj Bhawan by the Governor, who is also Chancellor of state universities, in the evening.
Reports said that VCs raised the issues confronting the varsities, like lack of grant to guest faculty members, who have not been paid for 11 months, absence of guidelines on fresh guest faculty recruitment in view of implementation of the New Education Policy (NEP), delay in regular recruitment and lack of government share for new pension scheme of teachers recruited through the Bihar Public Service Commission (BPSC) in 2017.
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The JP University and Pataliputra University also raised the issue of full freeship to girls and SC/ST candidates without any compensation to institutions. KSD Sanskrit university said the institution neither charged any fee nor got any government aid, and it was difficult to pay even the newly recruited teachers. The issue of GST on affiliation to colleges was also raised, as after 2017 it has come under the purview and there was no guidelines from the department despite notices being served to universities.
The VCs also raised the issue of education department officials visiting colleges without the knowledge of the university authorities and expressed concern over the direct interference. They also raised the issue of orders to stop salary.
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The department officials said they could seek income/expenditure details and universities could utilise the services of chartered accountant for it.
“The department can do audit, but it should be defined how many times a year. Incomplete audit reports are leaked to the media. The responsibility of the auditors should also be fixed and wrong reports should be verified. If CAs are used, who will pay them. The government does not even give grant for sports, extra-curricular activities and other allied expenses,” one of the VCs said.
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In the absence of Pathak, special secretary (education) Baidyanath Yadav gave a presentation, which said that the higher education enrolment was merely 17.91% in Bihar, while it was 28.4% at the national level, and no institution was in the National Institutional Framework Ranking (NIFR). “Of nearly 1.5 crore population in the 18-23 age group, the enrolment was just 26.2 lakh. The hostels are also underutilised — just 27% for girls and 60% for boys. Around 107 affiliated colleges and 53 constituent colleges did not even have their websites,” Yadav said.
He also talked about five-year perspective plan, which the universities said it was for them to do and the department could only give guidelines. When he pointed out that there were around 83,000 grievances across all state universities, the universities said it was due to lack of clarity on the payment of guest faculties and difficulties in payment of retirement due.
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On the issue of library automation, the VCs said that there was no permanent librarian and assistant librarian and teachers were on deputation.
One of the vice-chancellors said that it was a good initiative to resold the contentious issues between the government and the universities. “We have apprised the government about our long-standing grievances. The education department officials had their own arguments to counter our views. However, we were left in the dark as how our grievances would be addressed. We have crossed the fingers for a positive response from the government,” he said.
