New Delhi: While Jawaharlal Nehru University’s vice chancellor M. Jagadesh Kumar has been speaking to the media about how the University Grants Commission (UGC) has already sanctioned Rs 180 crore for a new engineering school in the university, a right to information query has found that no such grant has been disbursed yet.
In an interview to the Pioneer in February 2018, Kumar had confirmed that the said sum had already been granted to the university and the School of Engineering is slated to enrol its first batch of students in July 2018 through a joint entrance examination.
Background
The engineering programme was announced by Kumar in the middle of an academic council debate. Kumar described the programme as one of its kind – a dual degree which will be interdisciplinary in nature. “The School of Engineering will offer unique programme. It will be a dual degree engineering programme as the students in their first four years will study their core engineering while in the final year they will be doing their masters in one of the areas of social sciences, humanities and languages,” the VC told the newspaper, adding that the school will initially have specialisations in two streams – Computer Science and Electronics and Communications. He also said that the university will admit 50 students in each stream for the academic year 2018-19.
He had said that for the course, which will be enrol greater number of students in subsequent years, the UGC has provided Rs 180 crore and that the school’s initial faculty would be drawn from JNU’s “Special Centre for Nanoscience” and “School of Computer and Systems Sciences” and that it would also “ recruit 10-15 new faculty in coming six months before the launch of the School of Engineering”
JNU VC M. Jagadesh Kumar. Credit: Twitter/M. Jagadesh Kumar
RTI information
However, an RTI response on 26 March, 2018 by the UGC has stated that although it has agreed to the proposal of setting up school of engineering in principle, no funds have been granted, and the University has only been told to initiate the process by drawing up a detailed plan and estimates for setting up the schools after getting the required approvals of the university-level statutory bodies. According to the RTI response, these plans and estimates have not been submitted yet by JNU.
The UGC, in its RTI response, enclosed documents to show that JNU had requested an amount of Rs 123 crore in September 2017 for the School of Engineering. But the allocation columns were left blank, probably because no decisions were taken on it as JNU had not submitted the required approvals then. It turns out that even after six months, as of the last week of March, the university has still not finished the due process.
The same RTI documents show that the UGC may have disbursed Rs 2 crore to the proposed School of Management and Entrepreneurship, as against a demand of Rs 18.5 crore.
UGC RTI response by The Wire on Scribd
The basis of the JNU VC’s claims in front of the media, that the university received Rs 180 crore for the engineering school and that students enrolment will start in another few months, is then in question.
The starting of the engineering school was dependent upon the proposal being approved by the statutory bodies of the university including the Academic Council and the Executive Council. But many faculty members have said that the proposal was vigorously opposed at the AC meeting, held sometime in December 2017, in which the VC had claimed that the UGC had already granted money for the school.
The VC has announced that the engineering school will open in the next academic year – in July 2018 – but along with the lack of funds, the school is faced with the fact that the UGC has not sanctioned any faculty positions for it. As a result, the Executive Council recently resolved to divert as many as 12 vacant faculty positions from already-existent schools and transdisciplinary clusters. This has caused dissatisfaction amongst the teaching community of the university, as a number of courses proposed by other schools have been left by the wayside in favour of the proposed engineering school which, say faculty members, has neither been passed in a democratic fashion by the statutory bodies of the University, nor has it received the funds that the Vice Chancellor has claimed for it.
An email seeking the VC’s response remained unanswered at the time of publishing. The story will be updated if and when he responds.