‘Admissions to B.Ed. colleges at student’s risk’

Accept admissions to B.Ed. colleges affiliated to Bangalore University (BU) but at your own risk. This was the message conveyed to the students from acting Vice-Chancellor (VC) N. Rangaswamy.

After months of debates and discussions, the report of the Task Force for B.Ed. colleges reached its final destination — the Syndicate — only to be kept waiting for another three months for implementation. The Syndicate, which met here Wednesday, decided to send notices to the erring B.Ed. colleges and grant them three months to “overcome discrepancies”. With this, the university resolved to grant them conditional affiliation for 2012-13.

No backup plan

However, significantly, Bangalore University has no backup plan for students admitted to colleges that fail to produce a satisfactory answer in three months. This has angered a section of the Syndicate, which threatened to give a “dissent note” to Wednesday’s resolution.

When questioned by the media at a press conference held after the seven-hour-long meeting, a flustered VC admitted: “Students will have to take admissions at their own risk.”

This was in response to the query whether the university will assure students to accommodate them somewhere if their colleges in fail to comply with norms.

Dismissing allegations of university officials colluding with the “B.Ed. mafia”, Prof. Rangaswamy said: “We wouldn’t have discussed the issue so seriously if that was the case.”

Member sounds off

An infuriated Syndicate member, B.P. Madhumati, told reporters the resolution was “misguiding”.

“First they said the task force report is accepted in totality. Then they said the Local Inquiry Committee (LIC) reports will also be considered when it was decided long ago that the recommendations of the LICs for B.Ed. colleges will not be considered. We want the task force report to be accepted in totality,” she said.

Reacting to the ambiguous decision of the Syndicate, B.Ed. Task Force chairperson H. Karan Kumar said: “The task force’s term ends in June 2013. We will scrutinise the Syndicate’s decision. Of the 99 colleges inspected, 55 don’t have the basic infrastructure and staff. How can they be allowed to function?” He also questioned the need to allow them when the demand for government B.Ed. seats in Bangalore colleges was only 20 per cent.

Other decisions

Of the 28 items discussed out of the scheduled 35, the Syndicate decided to set up an OBC Cell within the university and release a Rs.1 lakh grant to research departments on the Jnana Bharathi campus for infrastructure and Rs.10,000 additional one-time grant for organising seminars and so on.