MSU lost Rs 35.41 cr through irregular franchising

Chennai:

Irregular franchising of Manonmaniam Sundarnar University courses led to loss of revenue of Rs 35.41 crore and undue benefit of Rs 27.73 crore to private technical collaborators, according to audit report by Comptroller and Auditor General of India.

The report stated that the Tirunelveli-based university started new mode of education styled ‘Satellite Centre Courses’ on 2008 and appointed 74 private trusts and educational institutions from November 2008 to March 2011 and permitted them to conduct courses and programmes of the university through face to face, online and virtual classroom platform under distance education mode throughout the country.

Not only that, the varsity also allowed the technical collaborators to conduct their own courses and examinations and agreed to allow university degrees or diplomas for all the courses, the report stated.

Interestingly, the audit scrutiny of records of technical collaboration programme in the directorate of distance and continuing education revealed that there was no transparent system in selection of technical collaborators. And what is more surprising is that the inspection of the premises of educational institutions for selection as technical collaborators was done on the oral orders vice-chancellor of the university.

The report states that the provisions of memorandum of understanding were not brought to the knowledge of the senate. Surprisingly, the university permitted the technical collaborators to conduct courses ranging from one to 323 during 2008-11 but failed to levy or collect registeration fee from the institution as per the approved guidelines resulting in the loss of 33.88 crore. As per the guidelines, every institution willing to run courses shall apply to the registrar on payment of Rs 50,000 as registeration fee for each course, the report said. 

The report further added that even though the ‘Technical Collaboration’ is an extebnsion of satellite center courses in respect of revenue sharing and offering of university courses through private institutions, the university did not follow the fee structure approved by the senate but fixed lower fee for technical collaboration courses resulting in loss of Rs 2.33 crore during 2010-11 alone.