MADHUBANI: With Bihar’s higher education institutions grappling with infrastructure deficiency and faculty shortage, academics have controverted the Nitish Kumar government’s grand plan to increase the GER (gross enrolment rate) from 14.3% to 40% in the state.
The plan to up the GER was announced by CM Kumar while announcing the formation of Bihar State Education Finance Corporation to augment student credit card scheme, recently. However, retired university professor Bimala Nand Kanth said on Friday the increase in the GER, specially in science and technical education, would prove catastrophic for the targeted beneficiaries in view of decreasing budgetary allocations for education.
Take, for instance, the case of R K College, a premier educational institution under L N Mithila University which imparts education from intermediate to PG stage in arts, science and commerce apart from BEd and certain vocational courses.
According to college principal S K Yadav, this college was founded in 1942 and has currently more than 10,000 students, excluding intermediate students, on its rolls. The number of teachers working in this college is 33 as against the sanctioned posts of 106 teachers.
Sources said posts of teachers were not sanctioned even after the introduction of honours teaching in science in 1973, nor when PG teaching commenced in this college in 1983. Also, no honours and PG-level laboratories in any of the science subjects could be set up so far.
“Most of the PG students of chemistry cannot tell a burette from a pipette. For, they never have had the chance to do practicals in laboratories,” admitted a chemistry teacher of the college.
College’s botany teacher Amarnath Jha blamed it all on the state government. “Practical classes are not held from intermediate to PG level in any of the colleges across the state since 1990s,” he told this reporter and added while the UGC provides funds only for non-consumable articles, the state government or the university has stopped releasing funds to run practical classes.
Chemistry, physics, botany and zoology departments in the college have only 6, 2, 3 and 1 teacher respectively against the sanctioned strength of 14, 10, 7 and 7 respectively.
“Mathematics department is without any teacher,” said C M Jha, head of the department of chemistry. Also, according to him, none of the science departments has any lab technician or lab boy.
“Gone are the days when practical classes were held in government schools even at matriculation stage; now even honours and PG students generally obtain degrees without ever attending practical classes,” said college’s retired principal Indra Nath Jha.
