The
IIEST bill was passed at the Rajya Sabha on 19th February, 2014. A
long struggle is finally reaching its conclusion and now the only thing that
awaits is the President's signature, which is merely a formality. It seems to
be a time to rejoice, hoping for a better future. However, will the students'
welfare be looked after is still a big a question.
It
is a natural fact that whenever a section of a society has too much power they
tend to misuse it, forgetting their responsibilities. That is exactly what has
happened with our universty authorities, who have assumed absolute power after
stopping union elections as the Students' Welfare Board and Faculty Coucil
among other committees remain devoid of student representation. Afterfailing
shamelessly time and again to address students' issues they remain anapologetic
and arrogant on their stance.
In
2013, a random audit of the mess accounts was performed in which a discrepancy
of close to 1.5 lakhs came to light. Without enquiring how this occurred in the
first place it was decided that the deficiency would be met by charging extra
deficit from the boarders in the current academic session. So we would be
paying our parents' hard earned money for food we did not even consume or worse
still for some corrupt individual's misdeeds.
Recently
the mess transactions have been automated and still, after 5 months from its
implementation the whole process is quite vague to us students. Many of us are
facing harrasment with irregular mess fee and added late fee deductions each
month. Some have been charged twice for the first three months' fees even
though they have already payed their dues using the previous arrangement of
mess fee books. When approached the bank officials send the students to the
mess sections saying they can do nothing about it and the employees in the mess
section keep avoiding their responsibilities.
Post
Graduate students are given stipends from the State Government but they receive
the sum a semester late from the university. Though this sum arrives within the
stipulated time at the university but the delay in handing them out to the
students is caused intentionally to gain undue interest from the bank. This
results in a lot of difficulty for the students and a few individual efforts
against this practise was of no avail.
The
Annual Budgetary Estimates and University Audit Reports are to be publicly available for everyone and
thus it is to be uploaded on the university web site. But the last time they
were uploaded, was way back at the 2007-08 academic session. When a few
students demanded a copy of these documents they were told at first to file an
RTI but later agreed to hand them over is given a mass petition of atleast a
thousand signatures. Such a reply, shows the authorities' arrogance, as they
boldly withhold public information because they know no steps will be taken
against such unlawful behaviour by senior post holders. But still these
students managed to gather a mass petition for the purpose and got hold of
these documents but the university is not handing over the Annual Audit Report
of the 2009-10 academic session and we can only speculate what the reasons
might be for that.
In
the past few months we have only scratched the surface and who knows what we
can dig up if we keep at it. There are already a lot of rumours around the
extent corruption that is endorsed by this university. Who knows why suddenly
in the past 3-4 years the placement scenario of the university is degrading
daily? Has the quality of students suddenly dropped or the job market is
turning from bad to worse or are there other factors we are not considering?
This column, perhaps sadly, does not endorse rumours or we would have a lot
more to talk about.
No comments:
Post a Comment