Campus collapse
Sukanta Chaudhuri | 05 February 2024 | The Telegraph Online
Higher education in West Bengal is in existential crisis. At one level, this is true of the university system throughout India, unravelling under the current policy of the Union government. But Bengal is not content with gradual attrition from misguided policy. Its universities are in headlong collapse through proactive misgovernance by state-level rulers. It gives me no pleasure to write this in a national newspaper, but the crisis needs to be recognised.
This is the more deplorable because, defying the idle cynicism of the chatterati, Bengal’s state-run universities rank among the best in India. Jadavpur University is consistently among the first five or six Indian universities, public and private, in the Union government’s National Institutional Ranking Framework and first among state-run campuses. Calcutta University is close behind or sometimes ahead. (The only competitor is Tamil Nadu’s Anna University.) There are many problems in these institutions, but we persistently overlook their very real virtues….