Kolkata, Dec 31 – As the people of West Bengal get set to greet the new year, there is speculation in the academic circles here on whether 2024 will see the end of the continuing crisis in the education sector in the state or it will get aggravated further.
While the solution does not appear to be totally unachievable, experts in the related fields feel the process will not be easy considering the multiple sides of the crisis with none of the opposing parties ready to budge from their respective stands.
The latest tussle has surfaced over the announcement by the University Grants Commission (UGC) about the discontinuation of the recognition of M. Phil as a degree. State education minister Bratya Basu has said that his department will not follow the UGC guidelines on this count and instead go ahead as per the advice of the department’s own experts.
Legal and academic experts feel that the minister’s stand will not be tenable in the long term from both the legal and academic points of view.
Legal experts feel that Basu’s argument is not tenable since on a subject like education, which is in the concurrent list, the state government cannot take any decision that goes against the Central Act in the matter. “If any State Act or amendment in the Act has a factor of a tussle with a Central Act in a matter related to any concurrent list subject, the clause of the Central Act will be supreme in the matter,” explained senior counsel of the Calcutta High Court, Kaushik Gupta.
Even from the academic point of view the logic of the education department in opposing the UGC’s directive on M.Phil is untenable. “For argument’s sake even after the UGC notification if the system of recognizing M. Phil as a degree continues only in West Bengal, what will those who get the degree gain out of it? For those getting the fresh M. Phil it will be nothing but a useless piece of paper when the question of national recognition will arise,” said educationist P. K. Mukhopadhyay.
The second crisis is the ongoing tussle between the education department and Governor C.V. Ananda Bose , who by virtue of his chair is also the chancellor of all the state universities, over the issue of the appointment of interim vice- chancellors for these universities operating without a permanent vice-chancellor for a long time.
Currently, 10 state universities are operating without a functional head as the six-month tenure of their interim vice- chancellors appointed by the government is already over and because of some legal complication the Governor is neither able to reinstate them or arrange for their replacement.
Things are also not quite right with the state universities which are running with interim vice-chancellors in the absence of permanent V-Cs, as the education department is unwilling to grant functional autonomy to the interim V-Cs.
On legal grounds, the education department is not even ready to allow the interim vice-chancellors to convene meetings of the working committees or senates or syndicates of these universities, as a result of which the university authorities are unable to take decisions regarding the academic future of their students.
One such crucial decision that is being held up relates to the new examination pattern in view of the changed syllabus at the graduation level. Even though some interim vice-chancellors tried to convene such meetings in the recent past, the education department refused to permit them.
Academic circles here feel that both the education department and the Governor have made the matter of interim vice-chancellors a “prestige issue,” with the ultimate sufferers being the students.
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