Shivani Chaturvedi (Chennai)

Tamil Nadu’s 24 state government universities are experiencing a deepening financial crisis adversely impacting academic standards and institutional stability. Years of underfunding, financial mismanagement, and bureaucratic interference have made it difficult for them to “sustain even basic operations”.

On the eve of Republic Day on January 25, R.N. Ravi, Tamil Nadu’s Governor and ex-officio Chancellor of all government universities statewide highlighted their plight, lamenting that many universities are operating with less than 50 percent of sanctioned faculty due to prolonged financial neglect. This alarming faculty shortage has cast a shadow over the future of higher education in the state, he said.

Among the worst affected is the University of Madras (estb.1857). Last December, faculty members staged protests against the state government’s higher education allocation of a mere Rs.7.59 crore as a block grant — an amount grossly insufficient to bridge the deficit of Rs.132.33 crore for the academic year 2024-25. Earlier in February 2024, the Income Tax Department deducted Rs.12.5 crore from the university’s accounts due to alleged unpaid taxes.

Likewise, Madurai Kamaraj University (MKU) is grappling with severe financial instability. At a recent senate council meeting, officials emphasised urgent need to generate alternative revenue streams to sustain operations. The university is also burdened with over 6,000 pending audit objections accumulated over the past 12 years, indicating widespread financial mismanagement and regulatory lapses.

“State-run universities are under tremendous stress. No corpus funds are left with them. Nearly 60 percent of permanent staff have retired over the past five to six years. Out of 400 vacancies, only 120 have been filled. Political and bureaucratic interference in university functioning has badly affected the system,” says A. Ramachandran, emeritus professor and former director of the Centre for Climate Change and Disaster Management at Anna University.

Although academics lament the funds crunch that’s debilitating state government-run universities and excoriate faculty vacancies, they are loath to discern a connection between these phenomena. Even as Tamil Nadu’s budgetary allocation as a percentage of the state’s GDP is declining yearly, remuneration packages of the professariate continue to swell. Professors’ pay and perks are as per Central government Pay Commission norms and are several dozen multiples of India’s per capita income. Assistant professors are paid Rs.57,700-182,400 per month; associate professor Rs.1.31-2.17 lakh; and professors Rs.1.44-2.18 lakh per month. Therefore filling faculty positions is an expensive proposition for the cash-strapped state government.

University of Madras: worst affected

Simultaneously, students’ fees in government universities are among the lowest worldwide. In Madras University, tuition fee for the Master of Computer Application programme is a mere Rs.42,170 per year. Neither the state government nor university faculty dares broach the issue of raising tuition fees because it would “hurt poor students from accessing higher education”.
Yet it’s pertinent to note that in communist China, tuition fees in public engineering universities for Masters programmmes range between $3,500-5,600 (Rs.3-4.8 lakh) per annum. Heavily subsidised education has debilitated government universities nationwide.

“Government and managements of India’s public universities are too timorous and lazy to grasp the nettle of tuition fees. The global norm is that tuition fees contribute towards 10-15 percent of the annual expenditure of HEIs (higher education institutions). Therefore, applicants for subsidised education are means tested, and scholarships and free-of-charge education is awarded only to needy students from underprivileged households. The practice of universal subsidy — common tuition fee for all — is a major cause of the poor financial condition of India’s under-funded public universities. Universal tuition subsidisation is morally, ethically and financially unjustified. Managements and faculty of government universities obliged to suffer poor public reputation should speak up in favour of targeted subsidisation of education,” says a professor of economics at a private liberal arts university in TN, speaking on condition of anonymity.

But the state’s ministers and MLAs as also professors and faculty having ensured that they are well-remunerated, are unlikely to do more than lament the poor condition of public universities.