Morale in West Bengal’s once famous academy is at an all-time low following continuous student agitations, institutional mismanagement, political interference and rampant lawlessness on campuses during the past few years.

The Trinamool Congress (TMC) government, which ended 34 years of hegemony of the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPM) over the state in 2011 when it swept the legislative election and assumed power in Writers Building, Kolkata, was widely expected to restore public confidence in the education system, but has clearly failed to do so. Nevertheless, with the next assembly election only a year away, it recently announced a slew of new initiatives in the higher education sector, a last-ditch effort to recapture the glory days of West Bengal’s academy and transform Kolkata into a higher education hub.

“Our efforts to develop Bengal into a hub of higher education are receiving top-level attention. We are also determined to promote centres of excellence in the state,” education minister Partha Chatterjee said at a SAARC (South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation) conclave organised by the Heritage Business School on February 25. A few days earlier on February 19, chief minister Mamata Bannerjee announced the government’s decision to promote the state’s first Sanskrit university.

Meanwhile, West Bengal’s first IIIT (Indian Institute of Information Technology) is all set to admit its first batch of students in July. While it will operate from temporary premises this year, before start of the next academic year (2016), the institute will shift to its own 50-acre campus in Kalyani. Established as an autonomous university run by the Union HRD ministry, IIIT-Kalyani will receive partial funding from the state government and private sources. The aggregate investment in the institute is estimated at Rs.128 crore.

However, despite the flurry of activity in the state government’s education ministry, there’s considerable skepticism within the intelligentsia about the TMC government’s higher education initiatives. Memories of the forcible appointment of TMC loyalist Abhijit Chakrabarty as vice chancellor of Bengal’s show-piece Jadavpur University in 2014, and the brutal police crackdown on students of the university demanding an impartial investigation of the molestation of a woman student on campus are still green in the public mind. 

“With most state government schools, colleges and universities — including Jadavpur — headless, and reporting acute faculty and teacher shortages, the expressed intent of the TMC government to promote new greenfield institutions and transform West Bengal into a higher education hub sounds like a joke,” says Sudin Chatterjee, a former president of the West Bengal Board of Higher Education.

But quite evidently The TMC leadership and chief minister Mamata Banerjee believe that the flurry of activity in higher education will smooth ruffled feathers on West Bengal’s all-important college and university campuses, before the legislative assembly elections a year ahead.

Baishali Mukherjee (Kolkata)