CM Jagan bats for overhaul of varsities

Vijayawada: Chief Minister Y.S. Jagan Mohan Reddy called for overhaul of universities to ensure quality education, compulsory apprenticeship and employment in Andhra Pradesh.

Chairing a high-level review meeting on higher education with minister for education Adimulapu Suresh and other top officials at his camp office on Monday, the Chief Minister fixed a timeline of next three years for all universities in the state to fill up all vacant teaching posts with well-qualified faculty members in a transparent manner, improve quality of teaching, change the curriculum, provide high bandwidth internet facility, arrange apprenticeship, introduce certified courses, maintain national standards and initiate a series of steps to give a major academic facelift to them.

The Chief Minister called upon universities to come up with modalities to ensure effective functioning of village/ward secretariats, RBKs and village clinics and also to help improve citizen services in sub-registrar and town planning wings. He asked university authorities to record the teachings of the best faculty members subject-wise and post videos online for the benefit of students. He called for introduction of academic courses integrated with training involving professional agencies like Microsoft to enable students find employment and also laid stress to provide requisite training to fare well at interviews. He said they were going to set up a skill development centre at each Parliamentary constituency in the state and felt the need to link them to colleges.

Underlining the need for introduction of the best curriculum to offer certificate courses, the Chief Minister called for preparation of syllabi for such courses involving experts. He laid stress to introduce bilingual textbooks both in English and Telugu media for a period of four years and reach gross enrolment ratio to 75 per cent by 2025.

Reddy directed the higher education authorities to hold a meeting with the vice-chancellor of each university in a week and find out problems and take issues to his notice to resolve them. He also instructed the VCs to come up with an action plan for three years to improve quality and also felt the need to improve their National Assessment Accreditation Council rating.

On fee-reimbursement, the Chief Minister said they were paying the amount once in three months despite facing financial constraints to ensure that no management could complain that they were unable to pay wages to their staff for want of payment from the government.

He underlined the need to provide skill development courses online and introduce English as a subject to improve language skills among the students so that it would help increase their chances of getting employment.

On degree colleges, he said there was a need to set up one-degree college in every Assembly segment in the state. The Chief Minister clarified that they were not forcing any aided educational institutions to hand them over to the government as it was a voluntary option. However, he said as some buildings of aided educational institutions were in a bad condition and if they were handed over to the state government, it would develop them in a better way by retaining the names of their donors for the benefit of students and the staff members.

The Chief Minister said, “Quality education is the only asset we can give to our children and once they grow up, it helps them stand on their own and our government is the only one which is according such a priority to provide quality education.”