The apathy of Nagpur University's top officials has led to discontinuation of its centralised admissions process for postgraduate courses in
campus this year.
The centralised procedure was started last year with much fanfare by the vice chancellor S N Pathan for first time in its eight-decade old history to streamline the system and to bring transparency. Unfortunately, the higher ups are now giving an excuse that they are highly short of sufficient staff to manage the process.
According to senior university official, staff shortage was not just the reason to discontinue the process, there was absolutely no response from the students towards most of the departments in the campus. Moreover, there were many discrepancies in the conduction of process last year.
The campus houses as many as 36 departments, but only handful of them had really attracted students. In rest, the response was extremely poor. Though the centralised admissions are introduced for departments offering science and home science courses, they too evoked a poor response.
They include stream like biochemistry, geology, botany, chemistry, mathematics, physics, zoology, statistics, microbiology, electronics and computer science along with home science.
The official added that all the campus departments badly lack regular professors and lecturers as well as facilities for research and this might be another reason for poor footfall of students.
Last year in June, the university had used a specialised software for conducting the procedure for over 400 PG seats. The university had also set up hi-tech gadgets like computers and projectors. The VC had even announced that the procedure will be subsequently be implemented for all other post graduation and private colleges faculties as well from academic year 2008-09, but all his hollow promises were exposed with this decision. Ironically, all the investment made with precious students money was also lost.
The centralised procedure was beneficial to students as in single prospectus of Rs 50, they could get admissions to any department of their choice. They now have to personally visit every department, purchase their prospectus separately and also monitor admission process daily.
The centralised admissions for PG courses are not new in the state as North Maharashtra University in Jalgaon and Sant Gadegbaba Amravati University is already conducting their admissions through same process. In fact, in Jalgaon, even the graduation seats are filled up using the same procedure. The procedure had a great success in those varsities. Sadly in Nagpur University, nothing seems to be materialised in wake of cold war between top officials, the official added.