Gulbarga University has been granted ‘B’ grade by the National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC), Vice-Chancellor S.R. Niranjana has said.
He told presspersons on Wednesday that the university got 2.91 Cumulative Grade Point Average (CGPA) and if it had got an overall 3 CGPA, it would have been awarded ‘A’ grade.
Shortage of teaching and non-teaching staff; lack of collaboration with other universities; low academic progress of students; and lack of required number of research works by the teaching staff were the reasons behind the lacklustre performance by the university.
Prof. Niranjana said that steps had been initiated to overcome these shortcomings and the university had signed a memorandum of understanding with Azim Premji University and the University of Bolton in the United Kingdom for training teachers.
While Azim Premji University would provide academic training and upscale the teaching skills of postgraduate and undergraduate teaching staff in Bidar, Kalaburagi and Raichur districts, the University of Bolton would provide technical knowhow and training to upscale the teaching skills of D.Ed., B.Ed. and M.Ed. teaching staff at the university and affiliated colleges.
Referring to the high number of vacancies in teaching and non-teaching staff in the university, Prof. Niranjana said that steps had been initiated to fill 141 teaching posts and he was not sure of filling the 322 posts of non-teaching staff.
On complaints about irregularities at the examination centres, Prof. Niranjana said that the university had taken a decision to downscale the number of such centres for undergraduate and postgraduate courses to overcome the problem. While the undergraduate examination centres were being downsized from 175 to 120, postgraduate examination centres had been reduced to 14 from 33.
He said that the State government would send an assessment committee soon to the university to fix the scale of financing. The Union government had released Rs. 10 crore as the first instalment of the Rs. 20 crore sanctioned under the Rashtriya Uchatar Shikshan Abhiyan (RUSA) and the balance was expected soon.
Apart from this, the university had submitted a fresh proposal for Rs. 40 crore under the RUSA under the science faculty for the development of state- of-the-art laboratory facilities through a research project titled ‘Studies on natural bio-molecules for human welfare’ undertaken by Prof. Niranjana. The Karnataka Biotechnology and Information Technology services had granted a Rs. 1 crore for an interdisciplinary biotechnology finishing school, he added.
