JNTU unable to exercise control

In response to the news item “Biometric Attendance Manipulation by Engg Colleges Stumps JNTU-H” (23.11.2018), I too wish to bring certain issues related to JNTU-H to the notice of common people in general and the intellectuals in particular.

No doubt, JNTU-H has been trying its best, after the formation of TS, to bring about certain changes regarding faculty recruitment, inspections, constant vigilance, and scientific modifications in evaluation of students’ answer scripts, giving affiliation to the private engineering colleges, maintenance of student-teacher ratio, weeding of fake certificates, laxation of dummy faculty and so on, to improve equality in engineering education. The university authorities have become successful in these dynamic changes.

Thus, in view of these dynamic changes made by the university, the university and the TS government do deserve appreciation from all of us. Because these changes have for sure brought considerable improvement in the academic atmosphere; and the private college managements have also changed their attitude, opinion and behaviour towards faculty recruitment, maintenance of student-teacher ratio as per the norms postulated by both the institutions – AICTE and JNTU-H, soon after the changes brought in. But still the university is unable to have a full-fledged control over the engineering institutions being run the private managements.

In the recent past, the university with a noble intension of improving quality in engineering education to the tune of world standards, as part of its quality check-ups, it has started faculty certificate verification to know the certificates produced by the faculty are genuine or not. To their surprise, they have come across some stunning facts about the fake PhD degrees with which around hundred faculty were working in various private engineering colleges in and around Hyderabad. However, the university identified those faculty working with fake PhDs in different institutions in different disciplines, and issued orders to the respective engineering college managements asking them to terminate the fake faculty members forthwith.

Thereafter, the authorities felt that the problems of university were over and thought to focus more on another issues. But to their dismay, the other problem in the name of biometric attendance manipulation floated a fresh at Vivekananda Group of Institutions situated in Hayath Nagar, Hyderabad on 23 November. It is really a shocking news to all of us. But for the university it is a stumbling block. The university is trying to reform everything at the institutions with an intension to improve standards in technical education to catch hold the world stands and opportunities, but the private institutions, with an evil intension and a sole object of making money, are trying to malign the integrity of JNTU-H by encouraging fake faculty and the cloning of Aadhaar enabled biometric attendance of the faculty.

This apart, there is one more flaw which has been in practice in some private engineering colleges since good many years. The private engineering colleges recruit faculty as per the norms and AICTE scales, but no college will pay salary as per the scale. Even if they pay the salary as per the scale, the managements will again take the fifty per cent of the salary back from the accounts of their faculty. This is an agreement between the faculty and the managements. The managements also take the ATM cards in advance to withdraw the said fifty per cent emoluments from the accounts of faculty. Hence, the authorities are requested to investigate this flaw too, besides investigating the biometric attendance system manipulation took place at Vivekananda Group of Institutes, Hyderabad to elevate the standards in technical education and to protect the state from such evil practices, further.

Dr Venkat Avula, Hyderabad