Most Deemed Universities Fail to Fulfill Criteria Pointed out by Committee

A high powered committee appointed to study the status of the 41 ‘C’ category deemed universities by Supreme Court has found out that the majority of them doesn’t fulfill the basic criteria to be called a deemed university. The report has mentioned that there are at most 10 universities which can ultimately qualify being called as deemed universities. The rest of all the institutes claiming themselves to be deemed universities are in no better state than to get a university affiliation from any particular university.

Earlier in 2009, the Tandon committee had put 44 universities under the ‘C’ category and declared them unfit for being called deemed universities. The Tandon Committee was set up to review the work of the deemed universities. The report was challenged by the university authorities who then went on to the Supreme Court and filed a case, which is currently under trial. UGC has again established a committee to assess the ‘C’ grade universities and the report on these universities are due in 22 and 23 September 2014.

The new committee under the supervision of H Devraj has found out that there were serious considerations that are to be made in case of the university status that these universities got. The new committee has come up with points such as how deemed universities got conditional status and without any proper infrastructure made it to the ‘A’ category in the Tandon Committee report. The other questions that the report asked are, how one of the colleges brought its sister institutions under its ambit without getting them separately assessed.  There were almost eight ‘B’ category institutions that were upgraded to ‘A’ category without any proper explanation, on which grounds! All of them are looked up by the committee for the final report in making.