Thursday, Oct 16, 2008
Some do not have phone or computing facilities: Anna University Vice-Chancellor

Chennai: Anna University-Chennai has made it clear to its affiliated private engineering colleges that it expects them to provide “good infrastructure, good faculty and good atmosphere.”

At a meeting with college chairmen on Wednesday, Vice-Chancellor P. Mannar Jawahar criticised colleges which did not have basic phone, fax or computing facilities, whose faculty are minimal and have minimal qualifications, where principals live at the mercy of the management, teachers are underpaid, students are beaten and parents are slapped with fines for every infraction or absence of their wards. Saying that many of these problems are restricted to a certain section of colleges, he made it clear that he would take action to prevent “malpractice” in the system.


Dr. Jawahar said some of the issues he raised were in response to email complaints. For example, parents and at least 10 students had emailed him about “manhandling” at a particular college. Others had complained about excess fees being charged, fines of Rs. 1,000 being demanded for every day a student was absent, and hall tickets being refused until the next year’s fees were paid.

The university intends to begin sending question papers through the Internet from the next semester for the first-year students. Colleges can access several sets of papers with a password an hour before the examination and print out the requisite number. “But you must have computer facilities in place for this. Some colleges don’t have a working fax or phone system, no Internet connectivity, no generator,” Dr. Jawahar said. In fact, students have complained that they are turned away from using computer facilities, citing “power cuts” even when there is no power cut. “For good technical education, students must be able to access technology. There is no point in having good infrastructure if you don’t maintain it and use it.”

He also encouraged the colleges to use the university’s infrastructure and resources through the Edusat lectures and faculty development programmes, which could help to make up for shortage of qualified faculty, especially in the circuit branches. “If you invest Rs. 5 lakh in the equipment and put a teacher in the class with the students, he will also get a chance to learn…from some of the best teachers in the State.”

He also criticised colleges which are reluctant to send faculty for the university’s training programmes because they are too understaffed to manage without them even for a few days. “If you treat your faculty well, pay them properly, you will get better quality teaching and better quality students,” he said, relating how he inspected a college where 83 of the 84 lecturers were only BE graduates, who had joined the college just two months earlier. They were being paid just Rs. 6,000 a month, in violation of the AICTE-mandated pay scales.

Such junior teachers are also making a complete mockery of the examination evaluation system. Last year, 8,000 papers were sent for re-evaluation, which showed some drastic mistakes, including 56 papers incorrectly graded at 10-12 per cent, when the correct score was around 65 per cent, said Dr. Jawahar. “Almost all the evaluators responsible were junior, BE graduate teachers,” he said. Teachers sometimes spend less than five minutes correcting a paper. “Don’t they realise they are playing around with students’ lives?”

He told the colleges that unless they sent their senior faculty for evaluation, their examination results would be withheld. In another strong measure, colleges were told to email attendance records to the university every month, and that the university might adopt the Andhra Pradesh policy of fining colleges which failed to do so.

While some college chairmen welcomed some of the Vice-Chancellor’s suggestions, several took exception to the university’s move to post college examination results on its website.