Delhi Higher Education Minister Atishi on Friday wrote to Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan flagging off irregularities in 12 Delhi University colleges funded by the State Government. Atishi in her letter stated that the city government has noted several serious irregularities and procedural lapses involving hundreds of crores. She suggested that the 12 colleges can be merged and brought under the Delhi government or the Centre may take their full control and in that case, the Delhi government will stop allocating funds to them. “Alternatively, if the colleges were to remain affiliated with the University of Delhi, the Government of India should assume direct responsibility for full funding. This financial support could be provided through the University Grants Commission (UGC) or the proposed Higher Education Grants Council (HEGC),” Atishi said.
Atishi said these 12 colleges are affiliated to DU and funded by the state government and not maintained by the Central government. “In last few years, Directorate of Audit, Delhi government has noted several serious irregularities and procedural lapses involving hundreds of crores from public exchequer. These colleges have created posts and engaged teaching and non teaching staff without the approval of their administrative department and Finance Department. Salaries worth several crores are being paid who were never appointed through the established procedures,” reads the letter.
The other irregularities include arbitrary and irregular payments towards sanitation and security services, allotment of canteen and other contractual services. “Despite having crores of funds lying in their corpus, many of these colleges have not taken any initiative to pay the salaries or other dues of their staff, in a timely manner”, she said.
The letter further highlighted that these are symptoms of a larger malice that plague these colleges. “Though these colleges are affiliated with University of Delhi, they are not answerable to it for judicious utilisation of their grants. On the other hand, they also do not feel answerable towards Directorate of Higher Education of Government of NCT Delhi, which is their administrative department, because they are affiliated to University of Delhi, a centra) University. As a result, neither the DU nor the Delhi government seems to have any reasonable oversight in the affairs of these colleges. As a result, even the Delhi government has felt constrained to take action against the management of these colleges even in the face of such established malpractices,” the letter said.
“ I firmly believe that colleges should have reasonable autonomy to run the institution in the best interest of its current and future students, no government can be expected to be unaccountable towards public exchequer,” it said.
Atishi has put forward two key proposals to the union education minister, aiming to address the existing constraints within the education system. The first proposal suggests a complete merger of the 12 colleges under the Delhi Government, meaning they would be entirely funded by the Delhi Government. In her second proposition, Atishi recommends that the Centre assume full control of these 12 colleges under the DU. In the year 2014-15, the allocation to these colleges was Rs 132 crore. In the year 2015-16, Rs 147 crore were allocated to these colleges.
In the year 2016-17, Rs 156 crore were allocated. In the year 2017-18, Rs 171 crore were allocated. In the year 2018-19, Rs 213 crore were allocated. In the year 2019-20, Rs 235 crore were allocated. In the year 2020-21, Rs 265 crore were allocated.
In the year 2021-22, Rs 308 crore were allocated. In the year 2022-23, Rs 361 crore were allocated. This year, an amount of Rs 400 crore has been allocated to these 12 colleges so that they can establish better facilities for all the students studying in them.
Twelve fully-funded colleges by the Delhi government are Acharya Narendra Dev College, Aditi Mahavidyalaya, Bhagini Nivedita College, Bhaskaracharya College, Deen Dayal Upadhyaya College, Dr. Bhim Rao Ambedkar College, Indira Gandhi Institute of Physical Education and Sports Sciences, Keshav Mahavidyalaya, Maharaja Agrasen College, Maharshi Valmiki College of Education, Shaheed Rajguru College and Shaheed Sukhdev College of Business Studies.