Hyderabad: CCE denies threatening to send Telangana University VC to jail over appointments

Hyderabad: State Commissioner of Collegiate Education Navin Mittal's alleged remarks to send the Telangana University (TU) Vice-Chancellor, Prof. D Ravinder, it seems is adding fuel to fire to the brewing discontent prevailing on the varsity campuses.

However, speaking to The Hans India, Mittal denied threatening to send the VC to jail, nor did he make any such remark, as reported. Reports of the commissioner's warning the VC to send him to jail has already done much damage causing the academicians in the State universities to fume against the government.

It may be mentioned here that the whole issue has come to the fore following the Telangana University Executive Council's meet on Friday.

The bone of contention was the appointment of ad-hoc faculty on contract basis by the Vice-Chancellor. It turned into an issue with the EC members accusing him of not taking prior approval from the EC, as per norms.

Mittal, who attended the meeting as government representative, while intervening had reportedly taken the VC to task. Besides, he asked him to reverse all appointments made without following norms.

The VC had to cut a sorry face at the meeting. before the EC members for the ad-hoc appointments he had made.

That apart, the EC members also decided not to pay salaries to the ad-hoc faculty appointed by the VC. They also decided to meet again on October 30.

However, taking strong exception, a professor from the School of Social Sciences, Osmania University, has come in support of the TU VC (who worked as a faculty in OU). He said, "the primary responsibility of every VC is to see that every morning when a student enters his or her classroom, they should have a faculty member present to take lessons".

The office of a VC makes no sense, if it is not in a position to take faculty to meet immediate requirements to see that students have faculty to take lessons and run classes.

A student union leader, Vignesh from TU, Nizamabad, said the university has three campuses with a strength of about 6,000 students. The main campus of TU is located in Ditchpally, Bhiknoor and Sarangapur. The university runs 32 graduate and postgraduate courses in arts, social sciences, commerce, business management, law and education.

Further, currently, the faculty strength of all the three campuses put together stands at 70 of about 225 and above the faculty strength required to run courses as per the University Grants Commission (UGC) norms.

The EC and the State Higher Education Department are reportedly held to the view that the office of the VC has no autonomy. It cannot appoint a faculty even for a day on an ad-hoc basis without their prior approval.

But, the State Higher Education and Finance departments and the TUEC allows the university to avail the taxpayers' money under the fee reimbursement scheme from the government. How and which rules permit to avail fee reimbursement without actually students having no faculty to take classes remains a million dollar question.