By Patricia Mukhim
The issue of private universities is a live issue the reason being that Mr CM Jha, Chancellor of the University named after him is still at large. He is not physically present in the State of Meghalaya which created the University on his behalf, to answer questions that the State Regulatory Board for Higher Education would like to ask. When the head of the University is absconding confusion will abound. This confusion is circulating like bad air. Media houses are getting several letters from those who have paid money for their PhDs but are at their wits end trying to figure out if the doctorate certificate they hold in their hands are ‘fake’ or ‘real.’ Then there are the undergraduates who have passed out of the University with degrees in Tourism etc., Recently the Arunachal Pradesh Public Service Commission was conducting interviews for their Tourism Department and they wondered whether the degrees awarded by the University were valid or ‘fake.’ Some members of the APPSC came to Shillong to get some clarity over the matter but went back with no answers.
No one can give the right answers unless the Government takes a call after going through the recommendations made by the Regulatory body. It is the Government which now has to decide whether all the degrees awarded are valid after ascertaining if the course content was taught by persons qualified to do so, whether the practical work was completed under the supervision of qualified faculty etc., In fact there are tomes of PhD thesis lying with the police for their perusal. The Government might have to appoint a committee of academics to determine the veracity of the work done. Who will pay for this gargantuan work of going through hundreds of research work is a mystery. Government cannot recover any money from the endowment fee of Rs 2 crore (which is meant to be a security against such exigencies) since Jha had already withdrawn the amount. Time is running out and the longer the Government takes the more anxiety it is causing across a large section of students who are now unsure of their future.
Many have expressed concern as to why CMJU was allowed to operate in a ‘business as usual’ atmosphere despite the irregularities. Why did it take four years for the anomalies to be detected? Vide the CMJU Act, the Governor is the ex-officio Visitor of the University. CMJU was created in 2009. Before that the University was already conducting several courses in Engineering under the North East India Trust for Educational Development (NEITED). The Institute was at first recognised by North Eastern Hill University (NEHU) and later derecognised. Today there are many questions being asked as to why the former Governor, RS Mooshahary took so long to blow the whistle. Students from across the country are bombarding the media asking us why we are reporting the matter only now and what were we doing for so long. In a sense they are right. The Governor did not accept the appointment of CM Jha as Chancellor because his academic credentials, including his doctorate was questionable. He got it from some foreign university with dubious antecedents. The Governor did not approve this appointment. CMJU argues that when it did not receive any communiqué from the Governor’s office the silence was construed to be consent.
The delayed action by the Governor’s office meant that more wrongs were perpetrated; more students registered for PhD and many more admitted to undergraduate and post graduate courses. So, many more students, several hundreds, in fact, are affected as a result. There are those who believe that what made Governor Mooshahary sit up and take notice was when someone was given a PhD in Bodo language when there was hardly any guide for the study. Also, Governor Mooshahary is the Visitor to other universities in the State (barring Mahatma Gandhi University and a few others). One of those Universities that Mooshahary visits and which has an independent helipad is the Regional Institute of Science and Technology (RIST) located on a sprawling campus of several hundreds of acres very close to the Assam-Meghalaya border. These Universities which are carrying out their mandate as per the Act are conscious of the wrongdoings of CMJU and might have brought these to the notice of the Governor. Besides, by the Governor’s own admission, several individuals in Assam had acquired their PhDs from CMJU and word had spread that they were getting them in a record period of less than a year.
Subsequent to the whistle blowing by the Governor, on June 13 this year, the Times of India reported that the Maharashtra government has found 12 people working as professors in various universities in the State who have obtained fake degrees from CMJU. The Director of Higher Education said these professors are from universities in Solapur, Nanded, Gadchiroli and Nagpur, who have been found to be carrying fake degrees from the dubious university. The State Government then issued a circular to Universities to immediately cancel all the appointments, promotions and increments of these professors on the basis of degrees obtained from CMJU. Besides these 12, there were 17 others who applied for jobs in these universities and were denied appointment in Kolhapur, Aurangabad and Amravati Universities, as they too had obtained fake degrees. Of the seven professors identified from Solapur University, five are from engineering faculty while two belong to higher education.
After so many wrongs have been committed it is imperative that CM Jha be questioned. But he has evaded arrest for over two months and the Meghalaya Police either does not have any clue of his whereabouts or they have been told to go slow because CM Jha has strong political connections. It is instructive that apart from some press statements none of the political parties are grilling the Government or questioning police efficiency. The matter seems to have been forgotten. No one really cares about the fate of the thousands of students who have a degree from CMJU but are not sure if it means anything.
Now that both the Governor and the Director General of Police are newly appointed worthies we can hope they take pro-active interest in resolving the matter. The former should push the Government for a decision on CMJU because every day that the matter is delayed there are thousands who are caught in the web of anxiety and depression. We expect the latter (DGP) to use all the intellectual resources he has acquired in his assignment with the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), to bring CM Jha to Meghalaya. Interestingly, when a local businessman complained that his daughter was subjected to domestic violence at her sasural in Mumbai, the police team travelled to Mumbai and brought the accused husband of the complainant and his parents and sibling to Shillong for questioning. May we ask if a similar team is despatched to Bihar to track down CM Jha? If a crack team has gone to Bihar may we ask why they have failed to find him? As a people who have been wronged we need to hear from the Police what the latest news on Jha is. They do not have the right to remain silent.
Most of the private universities that have come up in Meghalaya have no altruistic mission. They have come in with the profit motive. What is unfortunate is that they are not regulated the way they should be and that the monitoring of their function has been weak or absent. But to compound the problem, in Section 5 (a) of the Meghalaya Private Universities (Regulation of Establishment and Maintenance of Standards) Act 2012, the framers of the Act seem to have tied themselves up in knots by looking for recognition from any number of central authorities including the UGC. Why would any university established by the State be made to conform to UGC regulations when education is a state subject? Several universities have fought to break free of these shackles and want a liberal space which would of course be regulated by the respective State Acts. If the Meghalaya Act is a copy and paste job it only means that it was a lazy piece of work lacking creative thinking, imagination and vision of what a university of the future should look like. A good example is North Eastern Hill University (NEHU) which is regulated and funded by UGC but look at how it is functioning today! But the Education Department in Meghalaya has never been known to think out of the box. Speaks volumes of the bureaucracy driving it! The Act is akin to driving an auto rickshaw in the age of SUVs.
The least that Government could have done is to invite thought leaders, knowledge managers and leaders of universities from the State and outside for a brainstorm so that the Meghalaya Private Universities Regulation Act turns out to be an enlightened model. Alas! What we call participatory democracy is simply a jargon and nothing else because the Government always thinks it knows best. This cannot be further from the truth!