152 NU colleges face first-year admission ban, 148 get nod

Nagpur: The Nagpur University (NU) has put 152 colleges on notice after they failed to fulfil stringent norms for continuation of affiliation for the upcoming academic session 2019-20. On Monday evening, the NU also notified a list of 148 colleges approving their affiliation for the next session.
The 152 colleges face ban on first-year admissions to certain courses in case they fail to remove deficiencies as pointed out by the local enquiry committee (LEC) report within 15 days. March 31 was the cut off for finalizing the list of approved colleges.

The NU had received over 300 applications from colleges due for LEC inspection and continuation of affiliation approvals. The LEC reports were submitted to the NU in February while the final decision was taken by the academic council in its meeting in March. Presently, NU had 450 colleges.

At the beginning of this session, admissions to first-year of different courses were banned at 248 colleges by the NU on June 2, 2018. Within a month, seven names were withdrawn citing a mistake by the college section.

Then, in October, NU lifted ban imposed on first-year admissions to 60 colleges which had failed local enquiry committee (LEC) inspections or were running without a single teacher despite having continuation of affiliation for the academic year 2018-19.

Initially, the NU had banned 209 colleges under three categories — ones which didn’t apply for continuation of affiliation (98), those which applied but not invited LEC teams (29) and institutes having no teachers despite getting affiliation (82).

On June 6, TOI was the first to report about NU softening its stance against errant colleges. Following political pressure, the university had made a U-turn and extended the deadline, that was long over in April to fulfil norms as per its schedule published in September 2017.

Besides this, 58 colleges would be permanently disaffiliated. This would bring down the total number of NU colleges to around 550. As on date, NU has 603 affiliated colleges while only 450 are functional among them.

The university has been cracking down on errant colleges since 2013 over lack of full time faculty members and infrastructure. However, political pressure too has been forcing the administration to revise its decision.

The 39 colleges had affiliation for the current and next academic years but didn’t have full-time teachers for 130 courses as per the June 2 order.