Friday, August 9, 2013

After Appointments, Financial Irregularities Emerge at IMU

by Rajagopalan Venkataraman
Chennai: Barely has the dust begun to settle over the controversy surrounding the faculty appointments, when another seems to have raised its head at the Indian Maritime University (IMU). The central university has yet to recover Rs 22 crore by way of affiliation dues from 35 private institutes in the last five years.
As a teaching and affiliating university, the central university established in 2008 has provisions to give affiliation for private maritime institutes. While IMU has given maximum number of affiliations in its first three years, during the tenure of former vice-chancellor documents show that the then administration failed to collect even the initial fee from institutes, which is around Rs20 lakh per course for student strength of 40. Affiliated universities have to pay Rs1 lakh for every 10 students’ additional intake. 19 among the institutes were earlier under the IGNOU.
When contacted, Vice-Chancellor Capt Mukesh Baveja refused to comment, saying he was on a vacation.
A senior shipping ministry official, however, said that he would look into the issue and added that the IMU would initiate measures to collect the pending dues.
A faculty, however, feels there is more than what meets the eye over the mushrooming of private maritime institutes in the State. The same period when the IMU was founded in Chennai, Tamil Nadu witnessed a mushrooming of private maritime institutes. “They mushroomed like nursing and dental colleges, and many of them managed to get an NOC and affiliation immediately from IMU,” said a former faculty.

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