Twin vacancies hit varsity progress

Central University of South Bihar has around 900 students enrolled into various streams, but is running without proper heads.

The post of permanent vice-chancellor at the university has been lying vacant since more than one and half years. Worse, the registrar also resigned on May 29.

According to sources, absence of the two senior administrative heads is hampering the university functioning with even the expansion plan coming to a standstill.

Janak Pandey became the first vice-chancellor of Central University of Bihar, set up under the Central Universities Act, 2009, on March 2, 2009. After serving the university for more than five years, Pandey’s tenure expired on February 28, 2014. Since then, the vice-chancellor’s post is lying vacant with pro-vice-chancellor Debdas Banerjee acting as the in-charge.

Because of the absence of a regular vice-chancellor, there has not been much progress in infrastructure work. The construction work of the university’s permanent campus on a 300-acre plot at Panchanpur (near Gaya), 110km south of Patna, has not improved much. The sources said till now only the campus’s boundary wall had been built but work on the administrative, academic and other blocks is yet to start.

A senior university official, on condition of anonymity, said: “Leave aside construction work of the new campus, neither any major faculty recruitment at the university nor any major course has been launched in the university in the past one and half years after completion of Pandey’s tenure.” The sources said the exit of registrar Mohammed Nehal added more problems for the university.

The sources added that the Union human resource development ministry has been planning to make regular appointment of VCs for more than one year but no concrete step has been taken till date. Despite making several calls to Sukhbir Singh Sandhu, joint secretary, CVO, of the ministry could not be contacted. However, Ramjee Singh, under secretary, of the ministry told The Telegraph from New Delhi: “The central universities will soon get regular vice-chancellors and the process is under way.” However, Singh refused to come up with a deadline when the university will get a regular vice-chancellor.

Also, the university has issued advertisement for appointment of a regular registrar. The sources added that the university administration had issued advertisement for appointment of regular registrar on June 7 and the last date for making application is July 7. Sources said going by the progress, it would take at least two-three months for completing the registrar’s appointment. Not only in Bihar, 12 out of 40 central universities are functioning without vice-chancellors for more than a year. Even, new IITs in Patna, Ropar, Bhubaneswar were without directors since June 2014. The new directors at these educational institutions were appointed in April this year.

The university, at present, runs 16 PG courses and four undergraduate courses. The PG courses are run from its Patna campus at BIT-Patna while the UG ones are held at its Gaya campus, which is running from a rented building. The university has 70 faculty members but there are only two professor-rank teachers – Banerjee and Arun Kumar Sinha (retired PU teacher working on contract).

Courtesy: The Telegraph