Days after Higher Education Minister Basavaraj Rayaraddi said the Visvesvaraya Technological University is cash-strapped and that they may have to consider shutting it down, the Vice-Chancellor said on Thursday the university has enough funds to sustain.
Vice-Chancellor Karisidappa said the university had ₹30 crore and was incurring a monthly expenditure of ₹6 crore towards payment of salaries of teaching and non-teaching staff. He said the university would get revenue for the 2017–18 academic year by collecting affiliation fees from college managements which has been hiked significantly.
The temporary affiliation fee, which was ₹50,000 for a UG course per college, has been increased to ₹1 lakh. Similarly, the fee for permanent affiliation – valid for six years — has been increased from ₹2 lakh a course to ₹2 to ₹5 lakh a course for each college.
VTU sources aid this would more than double the university’s revenue. “Each year we used to get around ₹3 crore from affiliation fees, and this may now increase to ₹6.5 crore to ₹7 crore. However, only a small percent of this will go to the university’s corpus deducting the money spent on inspecting the colleges,” a source said.
Since 2013, the Income Tax Department has seized ₹441 crore from the university’s account for not paying taxes from its inception in 1998. The department had also said the university has to pay ₹127 crore as penalty for non-payment of taxes between 2004 and 2015. The university has approached the Income Tax Administrative Tribunal over the matter.
Varsity to do teachers’ profiling
For years now, the evaluation system of the Visvesvaraya Technological University has been under the scanner as marks of thousands of students see a huge jump after they apply for re-evaluation. To put an end to this, the university has decided to do profiling of all teachers.
Vice-Chancellor of the VTU Karisidappa said they would create a database of all evaluators and collate data of how many answer scripts they have evaluated. Besides that, they would also penalise evaluators if the difference in marks after re-evaluation was huge. To improve professionalism in evaluation, he said the university had decided to use professors with more than five years of experience for evaluation, and those with more than three years of experience for practicals. There was no minimum qualification mandated earlier. He said each page of the answer booklet would be bar-coded now as some papers would go missing during scanning or re-evaluation.
He said that a 24/7 online helpline would be created for students to clarify any doubts.
