Get cracking

The teacher education (BEd) colleges falling under the jurisdiction of Bangalore University (BU) are in a total mess.

Shocking details have been tumbling out over the last one year on the way these teaching shops were allowed to mushroom with absolute disregard to the rules and regulations. Irregularities continued to take place in a brazen manner but the BU authorities failed to take corrective action in time. The BU should take most of the blame for not just having allowed the colleges to start courses without adequate infrastructure or teaching staff, but virtually looking the other way when the students were being taken for a ride.

The result of all these can only be expected. Large-scale anomalies in the admission registers or examinations which started two months later than schedule, were just a few offshoots of the misdeeds. That hundreds of the 5,490 students of many of these colleges wrote exams without attending a single class is certainly not the way a future teacher should be trained or tested.

The Task Force and the committees that were set up to look into the malady have come out with startling facts relating to irregularities in grading the ‘tainted’ colleges. But the BU vice chancellor B Thimme Gowda, even after receiving these reports, has decided to allow the 47 ‘tainted’ colleges reported under “irregularities, gross irregularities and non-functional category” to hold the exams, raising the hackles of those interested in the improvement of standards of the university.

This truly outrageous state of affairs calls for immediate remedial steps. Towards this end, both the BU and the state government should start the process of setting the things right. It could be a two-pronged strategy, one to address the ongoing issues and finding a lasting solution to the mess and second, to set up a system to see the same does not recur.

Instead of taking up the task in an ad-hoc manner as the BU has been doing all along, it has to initiate definitive measures to set right the training system. The government can also think of establishing a separate University for Teachers’ Education bringing in all the BEd and MEd colleges in the state under its purview. This would reduce the burden on the Bangalore University, which has been grappling to find answers to various problems it is facing.