State mulls new procedure for appointing university VCs

The appointment of vice-chancellors to state-run universities will be more streamlined as the state higher education department is proposing amendments to Karnataka State Universities Act to bring in more transparency.

The idea is to have a common appointment platform where experts from the field will be members, instead of constituting separate search committees for selection of vice chancellor for each of the universities.

Sharing his plans to bring in reforms in higher education with reporters on Tuesday state Higher Education Minister C N Ashwath Narayan said, “In the existing system, appointment of vice-chancellors is not happening in a proper manner. Not just corruption, there is no quality also. We need to bring in quality by bringing in more transparency to the system.”

As explained by the minister, instead of constituting search committees to select vice-chancellors, the government should have a proper panel/board of experts to select the right candidate for the post.

“Currently, aspirants need to submit their applications and instead of that we should have a pool of eligible aspirants and put their applications in a public domain and after getting opinions from al the stakeholders including general public, we should finalise the candidate for the post of vice-chancellors,” said Ashwath Narayan.

In order to bring in this change, the department prepared to amend the Karnataka State Universities Act. “There is a need to build counter-check mechanism during the appointment of vice chancellors and we will soon propose amendments to the existing law on appointment of vice-chancellors,” explained minister.

Syndicate nominees soon

Answering queries on the appointment of government nominees to university syndicates, the minister said that the process would soon start.

The University syndicates are functioning without government nominees for almost a year now and few days before its collapse, the JD(S)-Congress coalition government issued orders appointing government nominees to syndicates. However, the BJP government stalled all these appointments.