CHENNAI: Annamalai University will receive Rs 525 crore, more than twice the combined allocation for 12 other state universities, under the higher education department’s revised distribution of the Rs 767-crore block grant, once again raising concerns over the wide disparity in state funding.
The Chidambaram-based university accounts for 68.4% of the total allocation, leaving Rs 242 crore to be shared among the remaining 12 institutions. The revised allocation came into effect on January 1, 2026.
The University of Madras, which is facing a financial crisis and an acute faculty shortage, has been allotted `52 crore, accounting for just 6.8% of the total grant. Madurai Kamaraj University (MKU), which too has been struggling financially in recent years, will receive Rs 60 crore. Most of the other universities have been allotted between Rs 6 crore and Rs 20 crore.
At the University of Madras, 67.6% of sanctioned faculty posts are vacant, TNIE had reported in June. The university has also been struggling to meet its recurring expenditure, forcing it to dip into its corpus and other internal resources to meet salary, pension and retirement benefit commitments.
A professor at the university said it had utilised more than Rs 90 crore from its corpus to meet salary and pension expenditure.
Higher education department officials, however, said the university’s substantial financial requirement stemmed from the circumstances under which the state government took over the institution in 2013. At the time, the university was heavily overstaffed and struggling to meet its salary commitments.
Since the takeover, the government has redeployed around 1,800 teaching and 2,900 non-teaching staff from Annamalai University to other institutions in phases. However, salary expenditure continues to account for a substantial share of the university’s financial requirement, officials said.
TNIE had reported last year that Annamalai University received Rs 553.53 crore in 2023-24 and Rs 565 crore in the revised estimate for 2024-25 under financial assistance to state universities. It was allocated Rs 450 crore in the 2025-26 budget estimate under the same head.
Concerns over the disparity in block grants are not new. In 2024, the University of Madras was allotted just Rs 7.59 crore, while Annamalai University received Rs 225.77 crore.
The government has since revised its funding mechanism, increasing the overall block grant for state universities from Rs 700 crore in 2025-26 to Rs 767 crore for 2026-27. It has also created a separate Rs 175-crore Performance Incentive Grant to be distributed based on fiscal discipline and academic performance.
Though the department had initially decided to exclude Annamalai University from the performance-linked grant, the policy note for 2026-27 shows that the university has been allotted Rs 20 crore under the scheme as well.
A senior official at a state university said the state should evolve a more equitable funding model that takes into account the financial needs of all state universities.
