COIMBATORE: Highlighting the apathy in redressing the grievance of their students, nearly two-third of universities across the country are yet to appoint an nodal officer for the University Grants Commission’s (UGC) initiative of setting up an ‘Online Students’ Grievance Redressal Portal’.
Irked over this, the University Grants Commission has now granted five days for such universities to appoint a nodal officer.
The UGC is planning to set up ‘Online Students Grievance Redressal Portal,’ aimed at providing a mechanism for redressal of students’ grievances and ensure transparency in admission and prevention of unfair practices.
The portal will enable students to register their grievances to the university/college for expeditious redressal and the portal will also enable the students to track the status of the grievances. The portal will also help the UGC and the university or colleges to understand the nature of students’ grievances, monitor, redress the same and help in shaping policies and implementing them to resolve such issues in future.
On July 14, UGC secretary Jaspal S Sandhu wrote to vice chancellors across the country asking them to a appoint a person in charge of the grievance redressal cell as nodal officer to monitor and respond to the grievances of students.
The UGC asked universities to furnish details of nodal officers like name, designation, address, email ID, telephone number both mobile and office.
But, as many as 450 universities, including 26 universities from Tamil Nadu are yet to appoint the nodal officer for the portal. Among the 26 from Tamil Nadu, 14 are deemed to be universities, 10 state universities and two central universities.
Now, the UGC secretary Jaspal S Sandhu has once again written to vice chancellors instructing them to appoint nodal officers and furnish information within five days.
This shows the careless attitude of the universities on redressing students’ grievances, rued KS Kanagaraj, national vice president of Students Federation of India.
“Though online grievance redressal mechanism is a welcome move, involving students in the administration and redressal mechanism on the campus itself will be a more effective system,” he opined.