Poor response to UoP senate polls

Of the lakhs of students who have passed out from University of Pune, only 52,000 graduates registered; just 13,500 turn up for voting

Poor response to UoP senate polls

Of the lakhs of students who have passed out from University of Pune, only 52,000 graduates registered; just 13,500 turn up for voting

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Around 13,500 graduates who had passed out of the University of Pune (UoP) in the past decade and had registered for voting, turned up to cast their vote in the final leg of the varsity's Senate elections
yesterday. The 106-member Senate comprises 16 members nominated by the chancellor and the vice-chancellor. Besides some reserved seats for MLAs, registrar, deans of faculties among others, the rest of the seats are filled by members who contest the senate elections.

Even they are under reservation. About 20 seats are for teachers, 18 for principals, 10 for graduates and five for post-graduates. Once the elections are over, the newly formed panel of senate members will be responsible for taking the most important decisions of the varsity.

These are decisions regarding financial planning, budgetary provisions, reviewing academic programmes, suggesting new programmes, degrees, courses besides deciding on policies for development and improvement of the varsity.

Elections for all other categories were completed over the last three months. The last leg of elections for the graduates' constituency took place yesterday. M L Jadhav, registrar of UoP, confirmed out of the 52,000 graduates, who had registered for voting, about 24 per cent cast their vote in the Pune district.

"In Ahmednagar, voting was the highest at 48 per cent, while in Nashik it was 25 per cent. The votes would be counted on Tuesday and results declared same day," he said.

Many voters said while the elections were conducted in a fair way, the information on candidates was not easily available."The list of candidates was too long and it only had their names. I wish there was some information on the background of the candidates outside ballot centres. We had to go to the information desk of each candidate or panel," said Anil Shinde, CA final year student, who had come to vote.

The candidates felt that the number of voters were far too less. "There must be lakhs of people who have graduated from the varsity but only 52,000 registered. Though it is better than last year's figure of 31,000 registrations, we feel that the university is not publicising the senate elections in a proper manner. And that is why we are not getting a good turnout," said Shankar Thakur, a volunteer for candidate Suresh Jain from Students' Welfare Forum. Another volunteer complained that a panel of teachers were trying to hijack students elections and had fielded candidates of their choice in the graduates' constituency.

"There were two panels that were formed by teachers, who contested elections from the teacher's constituency. They also fielded younger candidates for graduate constituency. They only want their own candidates to win from the graduate constituency too. How is it a fair representation of students? We want representatives, who genuinely work for students and not those who win on senior teachers' support alone,"
he said.

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