23 colleges told to pay fee or lose affiliation

23 colleges told to pay fee or lose affiliation

Engg Institutes Failed To Remit Exam Fee To Anna Varsity

TIMES NEWS NETWORK

Chennai:21.05.2021 

Higher education minister K Ponmudi on Thursday warned 23 engineering colleges that they will lose their affiliation if they do not pay exam fees to Anna University by May 24.

“Anna University has withheld the results of students from 23 engineering colleges due to non-payment of exam fees. If these colleges do not pay exam fees collected from students by Monday, their affiliation to the university will be cancelled,” Ponmudi told reporters after a review meeting.

More than 5,000 students are studying in the 23 colleges.

Following complaints of more failures in the proctored online tests and withholding of results by Anna University, the state government directed the university to conduct unsupervised re-exam for these students as in other universities. The university is planning the re-exam in June.

The state government had also received complaints about regularising guest lecturers in colleges. “The previous government planned to regularise around 5,000 guest lecturers working in government colleges through a committee and not the recruitment agency. We have received complaints that mistakes have happened at minister level. We held discussions with the secretary. We will also discuss it with the chief minister on conducting the recruitment fairly. These appointments will be made as per University Grants Commission (UGC) rules and qualifications. Meanwhile, the guest lecturers should not fall prey to middlemen,” Ponmudi said.

The government would form a committee to review and update all textbooks for distance mode programmes in the state following the complaint of bias in the textbooks.

The minister said, “It was brought to my knowledge that a first year MA textbook of Tamil Nadu Open University terms the DMK and communist parties as “parties against religion” and also accuses them of “preventing people from joining the national stream.”

“The book also says these parties are appeasing minorities and do not condemn “if Muslims indulge in violence”. This is what our distance mode students read in political science and history books. You all know where it will lead to. I was also a political science student and I have never seen such prejudice,” the minister added. The textbook, titled “Indian Government and Politics,” was published by the social science department of the university in 2005. The minister said he had directed university officials to take action against those who were responsible for it and remove such prejudices from textbooks.