Kerala - Thiruvananthapuram   

One-time development grant for varsities

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The State government will provide for a one-time ‘upgrade grant’ in the next budget for universities in the State, Finance Minister T.M. Thomas Isaac has said.

He was speaking at a function organised to give away the gold medals instituted by the Kerala Library Association for meritorious students in the Library and Information Science (MLISc) stream.

The recurring grant for varsities needs to be hiked by at least fifty percent.

The varsities should ‘think big’ while drawing up plans to build their infrastructure. (The additional funding for universities would also be based on the recommendations of a committee headed by the former Chief Secretary Rabindran Nair, Dr. Isaac later told reporters.)

The universities should also plan their spending, he pointed out.

0Sometimes getting money is a problem. But knowing how to spend that money is also a problem, he pointed out.

The curriculum of the Library and Information Science courses and serving librarians should be able to imbibe the changes that have come over the requirements of library users.

If a user comes to a library in search of some material, there should be at least one person in that library who is familiar with the subject.

A librarian can no longer be a mere custodian of catalogues. It is also not enough if a librarian gets for a user a set of books on a subject.

The librarian should also be in a position to tell the user where to look for a particular piece of information, Dr. Isaac said.

Dr. Isaac presented the KLA gold medal and the C.A. Augustine holy cross award to Amritha Raj who secured the first rank in the MLISc examination of the University of Kerala.

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