BU Council favours retaining Central College campus

The Academic Council of the Bangalore University has strongly favoured retaining Central College as part of its campus and has suggested the Vice Chancellor to hold talks with the State government in this regard.

At the Council meeting here on Friday, the members spoke about the need to convey to the State government the importance of retaining Central College campus as part of Bangalore University. Member M K Sridhar said the university members had to voice their concern in unison and there was a need for public debate on the issue. Any move to take it away from BU would be detrimental to the identity of the university, the members said.

The concerns came in the wake of the State government's decision to trifurcate the university. Many fear that the Central College campus would be taken away from the varsity.

Meanwhile, university Vice-Chancellor Prof B Thimme Gowda lamented that the government was proceeding with the trifurcation without taking the university officials into confidence.

“The officials have not been intimated of anything till now. They are gathering information from the media,” he said.

The Council approved the budget for the academic year 2015-16. The university has presented a deficit budget of Rs 42 crore. The Vice-Chancellor said the varsity had to cut down on a lot of expenses to manage the estimated expenditure. The estimated receipts for 2015-16 is Rs 381.24 crore and the estimated expenditure is Rs 423.79 crore.

“ The university spends about Rs 62.66 crore on salaries to its faculty alone. That apart Rs 7 crore is set aside for salaries of guest faculty. There are a total of 600 teaching posts in the university out of which only 350 have been filled,” the VC said.