With the government support to the State-run universities dwindling with every passing year, the universities are looking out for sources of revenue apart from the traditional courses and the government grants.
Taking a lead in this direction, Andhra University has entered into a series of agreements with the defence sector for offering various courses and which would not only bring in additional revenue to the cash-strapped 90-year-old university, but also provide a good platform for the university students to interact with the professionals from the defence sector.
Win-win situation
According to AU Vice-Chancellor Prof. G. Nageswara Rao, it is a win-win situation both for the university and the defence establishments “On one hand we will be embarking upon new innovative courses that will benefit the servicemen and on the other the university will be earning good revenue and the peer influence will rise to a new-level,” he said.
According to him with the various tie-ups, AU will be in a position to earn close to about ₹100 crore in the next two to three years.
The university will offer close to 117 courses in the defence sector, covering disciplines ranging from engineering to sciences and humanities to law.
Giving details, the Vice-Chancellor said, “Recently we entered into an MoU with INS Viswakarma, Naval Dockyard, Eastern Naval Command, for offering courses in B.Sc (Naval Architecture) and B.Sc (Hull Maintenance). For Eastern Naval Command we are starting BE, B. Tech and MBA courses in the evening and we have entered into an MoU with the Air Force for offering courses in foreign languages like French, German, Japanese and Arabic.”
Diploma course in yoga
According to Prof. Rao, the foreign language courses have already begun at the campus and the Indian Air Force has also signed up for a diploma course in yoga.
Putting all the courses together, the university will be earning around ₹50 crore in the next two years, and we intend to scale it up to ₹100 crore subsequently, informed Prof. Nageswara Rao to The Hindu .
These apart, the university has also tied up with the Directorate General for Resettlement in New Delhi and the university will be offering short-term diploma courses or skill enhancement courses such as diploma in yoga, fire fighting, disaster management and marine engineering. “These courses are basically aimed at retired defence personnel and the intake in each course will be about 50 and the duration will be for three months,” said the V-C.
The annual budget is around ₹500 crore, and the block grant sanctioned by the State government is about ₹292 crore. This grant takes care of the annual salary and pension component of the university.
The remaining is met from internal sources, such as fees collection from students and affiliated colleges.
