The universities and centres of higher educations should not be starved of funds for infrastructure and creating avenues for research and development activities for students, said Prof HM Maheshwaraiah, Vice-Chancellor, Central University of Karnataka.
Prof Maheshwaraiah said that the New Education Policy should address all the issues concerning higher education and make access to higher education easy with more number of colleges and universities. He was speaking at the inauguration of a two-day state-level seminar on “Higher Education: Opportunities and Challenges” organised jointly by Hyderabad Karnataka Government College Professors Federation and Gulbarga University.
“In India, there were 38,500 colleges and 700 universities, including private universities. This was grossly inadequate when compared to the population of youngsters seeking higher education in the country. The disparities in the allocation of funds by UGC among Central Universities and the conventional universities should end,” he said.
“At present, 80 per cent of UGC grants was given to 39 Central Universities, while 20 per cent of grants is shared among 700 universities. This disparity should end,” he added.
He stressed that the State government should increase allocation for education in the budget to provide more funds to universities to improve infrastructure and fill all vacancies. Most of the grants given by the State government go to the payment of wages of teaching and non-teaching staff and very little amount was available for meeting the demand for infrastructure.
Prof Maheshwaraiah said that the universities should diversify academic activities and move towards providing vocational courses at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels to professionals and introducing massive online programmes to offer courses online to professionals and those who cannot attend classes in universities.
