CHANDIGARH: Panjab University's income from
University Grants Commission (UGC)- sponsored projects will go down by 45% after the differences among the two reached the
Supreme Court.
According to budget estimates prepared by the university for 2018-19, its income from UGC schemes will drop from Rs 9 crore in 2017-18 to Rs 4.9 crore in 2018-19. For 2018-19, Panjab University (PU) has missed out on direct research fellowships. This year, it got fellowships worth Rs 4 crore. The university has also lost out on
Maulana Azad National Fellowship for minority students.
The university is granted research projects by UGC, central and state governments, including Haryana and
UT Chandigarh. Interestingly, the grants from UT would also decrease from the existing Rs 32 lakh to Rs 9.99 lakh. The income from these sponsored research projects would also overall come down from Rs 46 crore to Rs 38 crore in 2018-19.
However, former director of the research promotion cell, PU, Prof O P Katare also held the fund cut for the funding agencies responsible for this drop in the income from the UGC-sponsored project. "The government is not emphasizing on increasing the funds for research, instead the fund cut for the research is the reason for the decrease in the income from the UGC-sponsored project. We have not been receiving money even the sanctioned projects from the different funding agencies," said Katare.
"There is an overall budget cut from all funding agencies like
CSIR, DBT and UGC. So, this is one of the reasons that PU income from UGCsponsored projects has significantly gone down. Moreover, research scholars are not happy since they don't get their grants timely. The administrative lapses make it a tedious process for students to get their money from the funding agency. This could be one of the reasons students are not working to get these research projects," said
Rupinder Tewari, coordinator, DST-Centre for Policy Research, PU.
Raising concern over the budget cut for research, he said, "We have to invest in research. However, while doing so, we must ensure that the research we do is translated into the market and benefits the society. For this, our faculty need to be motivational and encouraging. Also, we need to overcome these bureaucratic hurdles to undertake good quality research projects."
