Bhopal: Four premier varsities in dire straits

Bhopal: The four premier universities – Barkatullah University, MP Bhoj (Open) University, Atal Bihari Vajpayee Hindi Vishwavidyalaya and Makhanlal Chaturvedi National University of Journalism and Communication failed to attract students as a number of seats remained vacant in the academic session 2017-18. While Bhoj and other two universities witnessed slowdown in number of admissions, the enrolment figure at MCNUJC and Hindi University failed to impress.

The Hindi Varsity is running 231 courses, however, as many as 170 programmes failed to find any student for the session. The number of admissions has fallen from 519 in previous academic session to 475 students in the current session. Out of 61 courses running in the varsity, 36 programmes have less than ten students, while 14 courses saw enrolment of one student and thus according to the rule, it was termed ‘zero session’. Seven courses are running with strength of eleven to twenty students.

The scene is no different in Barkatullah University. In 41 post-graduate courses running in its 25 departments only 508 students have taken admission on 1008 seats for the academic session. In 9 diplomas and certificate courses, 25 per cent seats are vacant as only 232 students have enrolled for the course which has 305 seats.

BU’s Department of University Institute of Technology with three post graduate courses and Chakravarti Rajgopalachari Institute of Management with one postgraduate course failed to find even a single student in for the current session.

Moreover, MPharma course in Department of Pharmacy and MSC Geo-informatics in Department of Earth Sciences has only one student. The student strength at Madhya Pradesh Bhoj (Open) University is deplorable as the number of admissions fell from 1 47020 in 2016-17 to 106634 in 2017-18.

There were 17 programmes running with less than 10 students for the academic year 2017-18. Some of these courses are BBA, BCA, MCA, Hostel and Hotel Management, BSC (IT), MBA in Material Management, MSC (CS), MSC (IT), Master of International Business and others. However, the numbers of such courses were 14 each in the academic year 2016-17 and 2015-16.

There were some courses like MA in Urdu, Master of Law and some Management programmes, in which no student have shown interest this year. The situation in MCNUJC University, country’s first and only government journalism University is also worrisome. The varsity has been running a total of 27 courses under 8 different departments on Bhopal campus. It managed to bring to its fold only 436 students of its 625 seats. These 27 programmes include 18 post-graduate courses, 8 graduate courses and M.Phil course of media studies.