The nine-decade-old Andhra University, the oldest in the State and among the prestigious institutions in the country, is slowly heading towards a funding crisis.
The university gets a block grant of about ₹261 crore per annum from the State government, but the salary component for the university at present per year, with the depleted staff strength, is around ₹410 crore. Of which around ₹199 crore is for pensions.
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AU gives pensions to about 4,000 non-teaching staff of different cadres and close of 700 retired professors, says the Vice-Chancellor of the university Prof. P.V.G.D. Prasada Reddy.
At present there are about 230 permanent faculty members and the requirement is over 600. “If we are sanctioned 300 posts, we will land in a huge fund crisis, as we will not be able to give salaries with this funding. With the present staffing our monthly salary bill is around ₹34 crore, including pension,” he explains.
Apart from salary component, the miscellaneous expenditure for water, electricity and others goes up to about ₹30-35 crore.
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Some part of the research expenditure is met from the UGC and DST funding.
Plan in place
To tide over the issue, AU is focussing on revamping its School of Distance Eduction, and efforts are on establish a state-of-the-art digital studio.
The proposal for the studio has been approved and a committee has been formed to look into it. The studio will leapfrog the school to a different league, he says.
The studio is being established at a cost of ₹1.3 crore sanctioned under RUSA (Rashtriya Uchchatar Shiksha Abhiyan).
According to the V-C, the studio can not only facilitate creation of lectures and transmission, but students can visit the site later to see the lectures from the digital library.
“With the creation of the studio and other infrastructure, we intend to enhance the revenue of AUSDE from a mere ₹12 crore per year to ₹40 crore in the next three years,” he says.
According to him, the idea is to see that AU School of Distance Eduction contributes to at least one month of the salary component.
“With the present block grant of ₹261 crore, we are able to cover seven to eight months of our salary bill. Our idea is to generate funds from various other sources such as AUSDE and affiliated colleges. If AUSDE can take care of one month of the salary component, we can depend on examination fees for another month and affiliated college fees for another. That is how we intend to cover the year,” says Prof. Prasada Reddy.