BHUBANESWAR: Ashok Das, who took over as the Vice-Chancellor of Utkal University on Friday, listed out his priorities in putting the derailed system in the institution back on the track. During the last few years, functioning of the State’s oldest university had virtually come to a standstill due to controversies.
A former scientist with Bhaba Atomic Research Centre, Das held a meeting with all the heads of departments and the officials concerned to take stock of the state-of-affairs in the university.
Filling up the vacancies, he said, is his top priority. The university urgently needs to fill up the vacancies as its departments are running with skeletal staff. Even as there has been no headway in recruitment of 51 faculty posts that was sanctioned by the State Government a year back, the vacancy number has now touched 180. “We are immediately going to move the State Government and the Chancellor on recruitment of teachers because this has become a necessity due to implementation of choice-based credit system,” he said.
The Vice-Chancellor’s four-point agenda for the university includes digitisation of knowledge delivery system, modernisation of examination and evaluation system, bolstering laboratories which are in a very bad shape and taking up advanced research and development activities which has been given importance in the Government of India’s Higher Education Policy of 2012.
A physicist, Das also plans to set up a centralised instrumentation centre in Utkal University like other top universities in the country. “In Utkal, equipment lay scattered in many departments. Almost all of India’s top universities have instrumentation centres where sophisticated equipment are kept under a centralised facility and there is a dedicated maintenance unit for this.
We plan to replicate this model in Utkal, besides changing the existing computer lab facility into a computational dynamic centre,” he added.
Among other things, a dedicated innovation centre on the campus and digitising the non-academic work through an in-house project are on the cards. This apart, the university would seek NAAC accreditation by 2014-end. As far as infrastructure development is concerned, he said priority would be given to upgrade the Parija Library.