Sunday, September 17, 2017

Madras univ goes paperless, set to save up to 70% cost

Siddharth Prabhakar| TNN | Updated: Sep 17, 2017, 00:21 IST

Chennai: In a move that will save the institution a few crores every year and simplify administration, the University of Madras has decided to go completely paperless. All the official files pertaining to syndicate, academic council, Senate and communication to colleges will be done only through e-mail.

A decision to this effect was taken unanimously at the syndicate meeting on Thursday. The 160-year-old institution is perhaps the first in the country to take such a decision.

The university conducts two academic council meets, two senate meetings and at least 12 syndicate meetings every year. Agenda and minutes of the meeting running into several hundreds of pages have to be printed and distributed to the members of these bodies. Syndicate has 27 members, senate 125 members and academic council more than 200 members.

The annual report and other reports run into more than 1000 pages. Apart from these, examination, board of studies related communication and documents are also sizeable. Besides these, all the invitations for seminars, conferences and academic programmes will no longer be printed and only e-invites will be sent, a senior official said. Paper work would be used only for appointments and finance related matters for a short while till the system settles down. "University can save at least 70 percent of its costs related to purchase of papers, printer cartridges for office use and printing costs," said vice-chancellor P Duraisamy.

The syndicate has also decided on scrapping a five-year integrated course on post-modern development administration and converted it into a two-year MA in development administration. This course was offered by Anna Centre for Public affairs, which faced difficulties in conducting language courses and providing hostel accommodation for undergraduate students.

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