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Six years after an expert committee first recommended the trifurcation of Karnataka’s showpiece Bangalore University (BU, estb. 1964), one of Asia’s largest varsities with 600 affiliated colleges boasting an aggregate enrolment of 700,000 students, the Congress government in the state has given the go-ahead for splitting it into three universities. Coincidentally on March 20, the state cabinet also gave the green signal for dividing the city’s municipal corporation, which has become an unwieldy urban sprawl, into three separate municipalities.
Earlier in 2009, a ten-member panel constituted by the previous BJP government and headed by N. Rudraiah, former vice chancellor of Gulbarga University, had recommended trifurcating the 51-year-old varsity into three separate units for administrative convenience. According to a spokesperson of the state’s higher education ministry, the existing Bangalore University will spawn new universities in the Kolar and Tumkur districts, 67 km and 73 km from Bangalore in opposite directions. Each varsity will affiliate 200 colleges. The two new universities will begin operations from BU’s existing postgraduate centres in the forthcoming academic year (2015-16).
With the number of BU’s affiliated colleges rising from a mere 200 in 1978 to over 600 currently, as confirmed by several expert committees, administrative supervision, conducting examinations and awarding degrees to 700,000 students of affiliated colleges has stretched BU’s resources to breaking point, and exacted a heavy toll on the quality of education dispensed. In India’s once most respected university, academic curriculums are obsolete; infrastructure is dilapidated and interference by quasi-literate, caste-obsessed rustic politicians in faculty and administrative appointments is continuous. In the inaugural EducationWorld India University Rankings 2015 league tables (see cover story), BU is ranked #47, well behind several state government-promoted — Anna (7), Hyderabad (11), Annamalai (27), Pune (30), Osmania (37) and Mysore (43) — universities.
“The decision of the state government to trifurcate Bangalore University is long overdue. The university was burdened with more than 600 colleges tied to it, and its resources stretched with the annual rigmarole of granting affiliation to undeserving colleges and conducting examinations. Between these two activities, there is little time or scope for BU to do what a university is supposed to do: focus on academic excellence, pursue innovative research and attract talent by way of collaborations.
Trifurcation will allow the BU management and faculty to upgrade the quality of its undergraduate and postgrad programmes and undertake research,” says Dr. S. Japhet, professor of sociology and director, Centre for Study of Social Exclusion and Inclusive Policy at Karnataka’s showpiece National Law School of India University, ranked the country’s #1 law school.
Though expert academic opinion is unanimously in favour of BU’s trifurcation to facilitate academic and research activities, there’s some wariness about the government’s proposal to share the already meagre faculty and infrastructure resources of the parent BU with the two new universities. Currently, BU operates out of two campuses: the Central College campus sited in the heart of the city, and a 1,100-acre Jnana Bharathi campus on the outskirts.
With the cash-strapped Congress government in the state yet to budget funds and allot land for the new universities, they will begin operations and share the already inadequate and crumbling infrastructure of the parent BU. “Instead of trifurcating BU, the state government should have set up two new universities, and transferred affiliated colleges to them according to geographical proximity. The infrastructure of BU’s two campuses is already in decay and the university is experiencing a 50 percent faculty shortage. Dividing the assets and faculty of a failing university doesn’t make sense and will weaken all three universities. The state government has to ensure allocation of adequate funds. Moreover, any proposal to revive Bangalore University needs to address and resolve the fundamental issues of government mismanagement, political interference, caste-based appointments and corruption which have reduced it to a sorry state,” says Dr. M.S. Thimmappa, former vice chancellor of BU.
Typically, the beleaguered Congress government has hastily cleared the BU trifurcation proposal without budgetary provision. A similar 2013 initiative of the previous BJP government to bifurcate BU had come to naught with the governor, ex officio chancellor of BU, sending it back to the education ministry. The Congress government’s BU trifurcation proposal is likely to meet a similar fate.
Summiya Yasmeen (Bangalore)