’There will be quota in UoP for each country’

V-C Shevgaonkar says efforts will be made to attract students from various countries

'There will be quota in UoP for each country'

V-C Shevgaonkar says efforts will be made to attract students from various countries

Dr R K Shevgaonkar, vice-chancellor of the University of Pune (UoP), is also a professor of electrical engineering from IIT-Bombay. He is the first IIT professor to occupy the post of vice- chancellor.

What's your vision for University of Pune in the coming years?
From Day One, I have been emphasising on research and also we want to make the processes more transparent. And for this, we are going to provide some special funding for research and have more PhD students on campus. Therefore in the next budget, we are going to propose more scholarship for these students. Full thrust will be given to automation in the process and eventually we want complete e-governance for which a software is being developed. We hope by next year that most of the departments will be well-connected. We are also planning integrated MPhil and PhD programmes. I also want to see UoP among the top universities in the world, though we have a long way to go.

What action are you taking against bogus colleges?
It's very difficult to do policing because university has no infrastructure to do that. We cover Nashik, Ahmednagar, Pune and it's difficult to keep track of who is using our name. What we can do is put up a list of authentic colleges and those planning to take admission in a particular college can check if the name of that college is mentioned on the list or not. In fact, since the time I have joined there hasn't been any case of bogus college. Before I joined, there were two or three such colleges.

Last year, Rajesh Tope had announced that Pune, Mumbai and Nagpur University will be bifurcated because of too many affiliations. What's happened to that proposal?
A committee was formed by Dr Ram Jadhav and they are working on the committee report which will be submitted sometime in February and March. It would be interesting to see the model they are proposing on, as they are planning to divide the university into four parts and pass on the administrative load to each part. However, everybody wants the UoP brand and how they will go about it is yet to be decided.

What about security on the campus? There were reports of thefts and political organisations creating ruckus...u00a0
We have recently appointed a professor in-charge (security) whose entire focus is going to be security. We are also putting up cameras across the campus and monitor the activities. But I think students have to be a little alert and co-operative. There have been cases where the cameras at the ladies hotels are damaged by the students because they think that their privacy is being affected. Our students complain that they do not get space in the library, as all the space is taken up by outside people. And we cannot say anything because they later blame us.u00a0u00a0u00a0u00a0

The examinations have been in constant news for either goofing up marksheets, question papers or for results that have been delayed several times. How are you addressing this issue?
One is negligence as people don't take their work seriously and second is manipulation and I do not deny that such things exist. We want to create a system which cannot be manipulated. There have been complaints about the examination reforms. For example, some say the faculty members are not co-operative or the questions that appeared were from a different syllabus. These errors happen knowingly or unknowingly. We do not have a foolproof solution to this. We are planning to create a large question bank comprising 1,000 questions for every subject and assemble them. Even if it is leaked, we still have another 300 questions to bank on. Secondly, we want to bring in automation in the setting of the question paper and a company is providing solution for it.u00a0u00a0u00a0u00a0u00a0

You had made a statement that you will limit the number of Iranian students? Why is that?
I did not say that. What I meant is that I do not want the population of foreign students to be homogenous. It looks like the number of Iranian students is more. There will be quota for each country and to attract students from various countries we need to do marketing. Though we have not yet set a quota, we are working on it.