'Eminence' denied, JU wants back the 75 per cent of the Rs 1 crore application fee
Telegraph | 16 March 2025
Jadavpur University will write to the Union education ministry to return 75 per cent of the ₹1 crore application fee the varsity gave the UGC because the regulatory body has since denied JU the status of an Institute of Eminence (IoE), vice-chancellor Bhaskar Gupta said.
Former JU VC Suranjan Das, during whose tenure the university applied for the IoE tag, said the regulatory body was bound to return 75 per cent of the fee according to one of the application clauses.
The status for which the state-aided university had been shortlisted in 2018 was supposed to fetch JU ₹1,000 crore in grants.
In June 2023, the Union ministry wrote to JU about the rejection.
Last week, JU’s teachers’ association in a letter signed by the association’s secretary Partha Pratim Roy urged VC Gupta to write to the ministry seeking a 75 per cent refund of the application fee.
“We will write to the ministry next week. ₹75 lakh means a lot for a university that is facing a funds crunch,” Gupta told The Telegraph.
JU has been in turmoil since the state education minister was heckled by a section of students on March 1.
Amid the row, the question of missing eminence returned to the fore following what Sukanta Majumdar, BJP’s Bengal president, who is also the Union minister of state for education, said in Parliament.
When BJP MP Samik Bhattacharya asked for the reason behind JU missing the IoE tag in the Rajya Sabha on Wednesday, Majumdar said in reply: “Mamata Banerjee’s apathy killed Jadavpur University’s IoE dream. While the chief minister spends crores on freebies and PR gimmicks, Bengal’s top university was abandoned by her government.”
Many in JU, however, hold the Centre responsible for the university missing out on the status because of a sudden change in stance.
The university had paid the application fee in 2017.
Former VC Das said the university was on a shortlist of eight “public institutions” drawn up by the UGC’s empowered expert committee for the eminence tag in July 2018. The university was told the status would ensure ₹1,000 crore over five years, Das said.
But in a letter to the Bengal chief secretary on August 6, 2019, the Union education ministry referred to a ₹3,000-crore budget purportedly set by the university under the scheme. Of this, the Centre said, it was ready to provide ₹1,000 crore and the remaining amount of ₹2,000 crore would have to be forked out by the state government and the university.
The Bengal government refused to oblige and accused the Centre of deviating from the original plan.
In 2019, then VC Das had told this newspaper he was not aware of any budget of ₹3,000 crore that the Centre’s letter mentioned. He had also said JU had submitted a proposal for ₹1,015 crore of funds payable over five years as per a December 2017 deadline.
On Saturday, Das said that in 2021, they scaled down the fund requirement to ₹600 crore under the IoE scheme and wrote to the Centre that if the education ministry would consent to pay 75 per cent or ₹454 crore of the revised budget, then the university would source the remaining amount.
Bengal’s former higher education department secretary Manish Jain had requested the UGC to “keep Jadavpur University in the list of eminent institutions, as per the revised scheme”.
The UGC scrapped the revised proposal in June 2023.
“Since the status has been denied, JU is entitled to seek a refund of 75 per cent of the ₹1 crore application fee. Anna University of Tamil Nadu, the other state university which was shortlisted, has since withdrawn from the scheme and has been refunded 75 per cent of the application fee,” said Das.