Half way through its sixth successive five-year term in office, West Bengal’s Left Front government led by the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPM) is in a tearing hurry to present the state’s 61 million strong electorate (of W. Bengal’s total population of 80.2 million) with a positive governance balance sheet. That’s perhaps why with one stroke of the gubernatorial pen, the Left Front government has presented three new universities to the public in 2008. All this without laying a single new brick.
The West Bengal State University (WBSU), evidently inspired by the New York State University, was created by a gazette notification dated February 25, 2008. Three months later, life was breathed into WBSU by another government notification (May 26) which affiliated 57 colleges in the North 24-Parganas district, hitherto affiliated with the University of Calcutta, with WBSU.
To date despite being christened a university, WBSU is bereft of a campus, classrooms and permanent faculty qualified for postgraduate teaching. A makeshift office comprising two rooms in the annexe of one of its affiliated colleges serves as its headquarters.
Likewise Maldah, a district town 192 km north of Kolkata, hosts the new Gourbanga University (GBU). It is also housed in a couple of rooms “borrowed” from Maldah College. Nevertheless 28 colleges sited in Maldah, North Dinajpur and South Dinajpur have been disaffiliated from North Bengal University (Darjeeling district), and affiliated with GBU. Entirely coincidentally of course, GBU’s first vice-chancellor Prof. Surabhi Banerjee is the author of Jyoti Basu: An Authorised Biography — a hagiography of the veteran CPM leader and former West Bengal chief minister.
West Bengal’s third ‘new’ university has been created by straightforward promotion. Calcutta Madrasah College (estb. 1780), which bills itself the oldest institution of higher learning in Asia, has been upgraded and renamed Aliah (‘Supreme’) University, with an eye on the Muslim minority vote bank.
The Left Front government is able to do all this chopping and changing in higher education because education is a ‘concurrent subject’ in the Constitution subject to supervision by the Centre and the states. Therefore, if a state university is not anxious about University Grants Commission (UGC) funding or recognition, which means that its degrees are not recognised beyond state boundaries, all this chopping, changing and rearranging of deck chairs on the Titanic is constitutionally kosher. But if WBSU, GBU and Aliah universities don’t obtain UGC recognition, their graduate, postgraduate and doctoral degrees won’t be valid outside West Bengal — ruinous for their students given that one of the first priorities of the brightest and best graduates is to flee communist West Bengal.
Although all the new varsities have applied for UGC approval under s.12B of the UGC Act, 1956, recognition is not accorded automatically. Applicant institutions need to prove that they have separate buildings, libraries, laboratories and full-time faculty. The way things are, there’s no chance of the three new universities obtaining UGC recognition in a hurry.
“The state of affairs reflects the topsy-turvy approach that plagues education (in West Bengal) from the primary to the postgraduate levels, eventually to the detriment of those in search of learning,” wrote the greatly respected Kolkata-based daily The Statesman in a hard-hitting editorial (September 1), commenting on this contrivance.
Meanwhile through the ingenuity of the comrade commissars of the CPM, three new-born blind mice have been let loose within West Bengal’s crumbling higher education system.
Sujoy Gupta (Kolkata)