Naidu vows to bring higher edu back on track

Vijayawada: Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu on Tuesday said that all the state universities will be strengthened and all vacant posts to be filled soon besides academic standards will be improved.

Chandrababu Naidu on Tuesday addressing a review at the Secretariat on higher education, expressed serious concern that due to the inefficient policies of the previous government and neglect of higher education, the entire academic sector has gone off the track. Stressing the need to bring the academic sector back on track and achieve positive results the Chief Minister directed the officials to take up small term and long time programmes besides focusing on strengthening the public universities.

“At the same time national and international level private universities too should be encouraged following which job opportunities will go up in the academic sector,” Chandrababu said. He told the officials to immediately take measures to resolve all legal tangles in filling up the backlog posts and issue notification.

The state has 48 public and private universities while 2,061 colleges are functioning under its jurisdiction in which 19.29 lakh students are pursuing various courses. He felt that the standard of public universities has fallen steeply due to various reasons. Thus, the officials should work out plans to correct the mistakes so that the public universities can achieve national and international ranks.

He also mentioned that a specialists committee needs to be formed which can visit national and international universities to study the ongoing standards and recommend the change of courses and curriculum as per the changing trends. Depending on their report the curriculum can be changed next academic year itself, he said.

University convocations should be organised on a massive scale through which the students should get inspiration, the Chief Minister said. Chandrababu gave his consent to the proposal to bring in a single legislation replacing all the eight existing laws and also suggested that noted industrialists can be appointed as chairpersons of the Board of Governance which is in vogue in IITs and IIMs.

The CM also decided to establish Artificial Intelligence (AI) university on Public-Private Participation (PPP) basis and told the officials to see to it that the proposed Sports Village in Amaravathi should be with global standards.

Minister for education Nara Lokesh, and officials were present at the review.