Intake ban hits 10k students in 2nd, 3rd year too

Nagpur: The Nagpur University’s (NU) ban on 129 colleges, and vice chancellor SP Kane’s refusal to allow ‘postgraduate recognized’ teachers to teach masters programmes have left over 10,000 students in the lurch. These students have entered the 3rd and 5th semesters of PG and UG courses respectively, and the crack down on colleges is likely to leave them without teachers.
The ban on affiliated colleges, including many well-known ones, brought to fore the fact that they never had regular teachers but were running the UG and PG courses with the help of part-timers. In case of masters programmes, UG teachers ‘recognized’ as PG teachers by NU were assigned lectures. This arrangement had allowed some colleges to admit students in the last couple of years, though NU banned several other colleges.
However, this year, NU made a sudden U-turn on its policy of allowing PG-recognized teachers to teach in masters programmes. NU also didn’t factor in the impact of its decision on students already enrolled with these colleges, who are either entering 2nd or 3rd year of UG courses, or 2nd year of PG courses.
NU college section says that in the 129 banned colleges, hundreds of students are enrolled in the now banned courses. The section couldn’t give an exact figure. Even assuming 50 students enrolled per course, the tally comes to 5,250 students in second year and as many for third year in UG courses. Around 1,000 are likely to be enrolled in PG courses.
Though the move has been hailed by many teachers, they said NU must take the responsibility of shifting these students to other colleges since their colleges faced actions because there were no teachers.
The policy was changed by Board of Deans led by ProVC Pramod Yeole during its meeting last year. The issue of Pantawane College, where BCom students were given admission without affiliation to the course was placed before the BoD. Concerns were raised whether a college could be allowed to run a course on the basis of a single teacher. Pantawane had shown its single teacher as in-charge of other courses, revealed NU officials.
Hence, BoD decided to change the policy and make it mandatory to appoint at least one full-time PG teacher per course from this year.
Besides this, many feel NU hasn’t done enough to warn gullible students against taking admissions in errant colleges.
Some academicians cautioned students to thoroughly verify credentials before taking admissions in NU colleges, as even old and reputed colleges like Shivaji Science, Hislop, Dharampeth Science, Dharampeth Commerce, Kamla Nehru, Dhanwate National College (DNC), GH Raisoni, PWS, and Porwal among others, were in the blacklist.