The Academic Quality Improvement Committee, constituted for studying the quality of colleges offering professional courses in the Education stream (B.Ed, B.P.Ed and M.Ed) under Gulbarga University, Kalaburagi (GUK), has expressed dissatisfaction with a number of colleges.
Between October 4 and 13, the nine-member committee headed by Prof. Hoovinabhavi Babanna L., Dean of Faculty of Education, visited all the 75 colleges in Bidar, Kalaburagi, Yadgir and Raichur districts and examined them on multiple parameters. A copy of the panel’s report, submitted to the university registrar on October 21, is available with The Hindu .
During the inspections, the committee found gross violations in both the admission and reservation procedures. It has identified 12 colleges that converted unfilled government quota seats into management quota seats without prior permission from State government. Bidar tops with nine such colleges, followed by Raichur (2) and Kalaburagi (1).
The committee has named many colleges in Bidar that have violated reservation procedures under Article 371(J) of the Constitution by filling more than 50% of their seats with out-of-State students. A few colleges are said to have admitted students without permission from the National Council for Teacher Education (NCTE) while a few others were permitted to function even though they had not bothered to apply for accreditation from the Quality Council of India, as is mandatory. The panel also found many colleges in Bidar that had violated the admission notification by admitting students at will, even months after the last date of admission in a few cases.
Staff situation
The panel has observed wide gaps between availability and requirement of staff. It has listed 48 colleges — 24 of them in Bidar district — that did not have a qualified working principal. Not a single college was found to have full-fledged faculty as approved by the government. Fifty of the 75 colleges were found to be operating with a staff strength of below 50%. Five had just one teacher, while 36 had six or fewer.
On the infrastructure front, the committee has observed that many of the colleges did not have their own buildings, while some were functioning out of small rented structures, multi-course buildings or industrial sheds with asbestos sheets for roof.
The report also points out administrative lapses in many colleges, including non-maintenance of admission registers, staff and student attendance registers, library accession registers and fee receipts. The committee members have even complained that a few institutions did not cooperate with them.
Speaking to The Hindu on Saturday, Venkatesh Patel, Academic Council member, demanded that the university consider these observations seriously and cancel the affiliations of colleges that have violated the norms and do not fulfil the minimum requirements set by the university and the NCTE. “The Hyderabad Karnataka region is already backward educationally for historical reasons. If colleges that do not meet the minimum academic and infrastructure requirements are allowed to function, just imagine how bad will be the quality of the teachers these institutions will produce. It will only decrease the quality of education in the region,” he said.
GUK Vice-Chancellor S.R. Niranjana and Registrar Dayanand Asgar were not reachable for their comments on the matter.
