Tamil Nadu to await apex court verdict over deemed varsities

CHENNAI - The Tamil Nadu government has decided to wait for the Supreme Court judgement on how to integrate students of 16 deemed universities in regular colleges.

On Monday the central government had recommended the cancellation of deemed university status to 44 institutions of which 16 are located in Tamil Nadu.

According to Tamil Nadu’s Minster for Higher Education K. Ponmudy, the state will wait for the court verdict and will comply with that.

Meanwhile the deemed universities are considering legal options like impleading themselves in the Supreme Court case.

“It is not fair to withdraw deemed university status,” said Isari K. Ganesh, chancellor of Vel University.

In Tamil Nadu a sizeable number of deemed universities are run by politicians and their relatives and higher education has turned out to be a lucrative business in the state that rolls out more than 100,000 engineers every year.

The central government Monday told the Supreme Court that it was all set to divest 44 universities of their special “deemed university” status as they were being run as “family fiefdoms” rather than institutions of academic excellence.

Appearing before the central government, Solicitor General Gopal Subramanium made this submission to a bench of Justice Dalveer Bhandari and Justice Mukundkam Sharma, during the hearing of a 2006 lawsuit, questioning the misuse of the deemed university status by a glut of educational shops.

Subramanium also told the bench that the government, however, has decided to let these universities revert to becoming affiliated colleges of their original universities.

This is to avoid jeopardising the career of nearly 200,000 students studying in these institutions across 13 states, he told the court.

In an affidavit, the union human resource development ministry said that the government has also accepted the recommendations made by the high-powered P.N. Tandon committee, formed to probe the conditions of deemed universities across the country.

“The review committee came across several aberrations in the functioning of some of the institutions deemed to be universities. It found undesirable management architecture where families rather than professional academics controlled the functioning of institutions,” the affidavit said.

According to the affidavit, most of the 44 deemed universities failing to maintain a high standard of academic excellence were offering postgraduate and undergraduate courses that are “fragmented with concocted nomenclatures” and seats were increased beyond the actual intake capacity.

The bench, during an earlier hearing in July last year, had questioned the need for having deemed universities in the country in wake of their mushrooming growth amid complaints that instead of imparting quality education, they have been fleecing students by commercialising education.

“Why deemed university at all? Don’t you think the status of deemed university should be abolished in all the states?” the bench had asked, while directing the centre to file a detailed affidavit on deemed universities and their conditions in the country.

The bench adjourned the matter Monday after a brief perusal of the affidavit.