With less than a week left for the first semester BEd examinations, Bangalore University (BU) has notified a list of examination centres that include blacklisted, non-functional and disaffiliated colleges.
The notification, dated June 1, listed 143 colleges that are attached to 33 examination centres.
Surprisingly, the list includes colleges that do not have the University’s affiliation or recognition of the National Council for Teacher Education (NCTE), an apex body. This means that the University has permitted 143 colleges to conduct the examinations, scheduled to start on June 10.
For instance, the NCTE has withdrawn its recognition for BEd programmes at CMR College of Education, M S Ramaiah College of Education and Sri Nirvana Swamy College of Education.
However, the University has designated these colleges as examination centres. Further, colleges such as K K College of Education, Kamala Nehru College of Education, Auckland College, Archana BEd College, Acharya College and Mother Teresa College among others do not have BU affiliation and still feature in the list.
Colleges such as Jnana Vikas College, Rajiv Gandhi College, Manjula Mallesh College and Amita B Ed College - blacklisted by the Academic Audit Committee since 2009 - have also been included in the notification.
In an official communique to the Department of Higher Education, the University on May 30 stated that only 26 B Ed colleges have affiliation for the year 2012-13.
Further, by the University’s own admission, there are only 97 B Ed colleges under it.
“The university bodies have resolved to renew affiliation of another 47 colleges for 2012-13. But how did the university find 143 colleges when it says there are only 97 colleges?” asked H Karan Kumar, an academic council member whose resignation is ‘under consideration’.
Kumar alleged, “BU has asked the government’s permission to conduct examinations for these colleges, which is unusual. With this, the authorities are simply trying to pass the buck.”
‘New List Soon’
Admitting the mistake, Registrar (Evaluation) R K Somashekhar said the notification was a ‘mistake by oversight’ committed by the university section concerned. “It was assumed (by the section) that we could include these colleges as we had announced their results as per the Syndicate resolution. We will issue a new list shortly,” he told Express.