The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Chennai News : Anna varsity to form anti-harassment cell

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Oct 06, 2004

Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu - Chennai

Anna varsity to form anti-harassment cell

By Our Special Correspondent

CHENNAI, OCT. 5. Following complaints from parents, students and the public against unaided engineering colleges, Anna University has decided to create a vigilance and anti-harassment cell. This empowered cell will go into complaints supported by proof.

Headed by a senior professor and including a senior police officer and a legal officer, besides academics, the cell will recommend to the university remedial action on complaints, the Vice-Chancellor, E. Balagurusamy, said here today. It would have powers to enter a college and make enquiries.

"We are receiving complaints that some of the managements were collecting excess fee, levying heavy fines, ill-treating parents, blackmailing students while giving hall tickets, forcing students to travel by college bus and demanding a heavy premium from students who want a transfer to another college... We have even had complaints of a parent being assaulted by a college chairman," he said.

The cell would certainly look for authenticity of the complaints. The names of persons giving complaints would be kept confidential but that did not mean a mere e-mail or letters would be acted upon.

"The idea is to ensure that the learning environment in a college is improved and we should be able to intervene on behalf of a student and defuse problems," Prof. Balagurusamy said.

30,000 vacancies?

On admissions, he said a summary assessment showed that 29,000-30,000 seats could be vacant in the engineering colleges this year. In all, about 69,100 seats were available in the colleges excluding 11 institutions, which were put on the `No-admissions' list. Under the single-window system of counselling, about 28,000 students were admitted. "Our information is that about 17,000 students have been admitted under the management quota. But it is possible that about 5,000 of these admissions were "duplicated" in that the students would have secured admission under both methods. In effect, about 40,000 students would have got admission to engineering. Which means about 29,000 seats or more would be vacant today, " the Vice-Chancellor said.

The university asked the colleges to send the admission list including under the management quota by October 15. Within another 15 days "we hope to verify all the records of management quota admissions and also whether the managements have followed reservation norms."

National policy

Prof. Balagurusamy said he had written to the Union Minister for Human Resource Development, Arjun Singh, on the need for a consensus on a national policy for conducting a common entrance examination for engineering admissions.

"Any policy needs to allow for regional differences in terms of culture, language, educational standards and economic development levels. That flexibility has to be brought in to accommodate all these differences, within the national policy."

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