With Punjab University facing severe financial crisis, Punjab Governor and UT Administrator VP Singh Badnore on Friday urged the Union Home Minister to resolve the problems of the University.
“Punjab Univeristy has a glorious past, a world class infrastructure and learned faculty but today it is facing numerous issues primarily of status and financial resources, which needs to be resolved, said Badnore while speaking at the Northern Zonal Council meet.
Notably, PU authorities had last month announced huge fee hike for various courses to generate more funds. This had led to an immediate reaction from the students and PU had witnessed large-scale violence as students and the police clashed on the campus during protest against fee hike. The issue had hit the national headlines as many students were even booked for sedition but the charges were dropped later.
The PU senate had recently rolled back the controversial hike in tuition fee for the 2017-18 session and decided to increase it by just 10% across the courses for new students.
The UT Administrator also raised concern on the tremendous pressure on OPDs and other services in the PGIMER.
Apart from this, the Administrator sought assistance to revive Sukhna lake, which has been running short of water at frequent intervals. Other demands put forth by the Administrator included, creation of a ring road/by-pass around Chandigarh to prevent surplus traffic within the city and strengthening of inter-state police cooperation.
Badnore said, “Chandigarh being the seat of 3 governments has made rapid strides towards entering into a new era of e-governance and responsive administration. Due to the upsurge of population, the city is under increasing pressure of developmental requirements. To meet the same, preparation of a functional plan having integrated proposal of transport network, physical and social infrastructure is desirable.”
On implementation of master plan, he said that the Chandigarh Master Plan 2031 along with Smart City proposals are being implemented expeditiously. The CMP 2031 expects symbiotic relations with the regional urban areas. It expects that the three partners in development, Punjab, Haryana and UT Chandigarh should have an understanding and coordination between themselves for sharing key responsibilities for locating some of the spillover infrastructure components of Chandigarh in their territory and to reduce the pressure on our limited land bank, he added.