Given that Mumbai University (MU, estb.1857) has 159 years of education management experience, it’s natural to expect it to have streamlined its assessment and examination systems. But as is the case with most of the country’s ancient universities ruined by successive state governments given to beating populism and parochialism drums, administration and academic standards in Bombay University, whose name was changed to Mumbai University in deference to parochial sub-nationalism in 1996, have steadily gone from bad to worse.

Latest proof of declining standards in MU is the delay in declaring results of 63 undergraduate and postgraduate exams held in March/April, until August. This postponement which is in violation of MU’s norm of 45 days as stipulated by the Maharashtra Universities Act, 1994, has clouded the future plans of more than 100,000 students who wrote the exams 60-90 days ago. The furore over delayed results could not have come at a worse time for the varsity which is already facing flak after data gathered under the Right to Information Act, 2005 (which empowers citizens to seek information from government institutions) has exposed its maladministration regarding assessment of answer scripts.

Unsurprisingly, students who wrote postgraduate (MA, M.Com) and several undergraduate exams including bachelor of management studies (BMS) and have waited for their results for more than three months, are up in arms. Even the marksheets of students who applied for re-evaluation of their October 2015 exam answer scripts are not ready as yet. Consequently, a large number of undergrad students have missed the deadlines for admission into the postgrad programmes of several universities in India and abroad.

“Mumbai University hasn’t declared exam results on time in the past three years. Despite the clear 45-day time window mandated by the Maharashtra Universities Act, it takes around 60-70 days for hard copies of marksheets to be ready. The varsity’s indolent administration doesn’t care about students and has no intention of getting its act together,” says Rohit Chandode, organisational secretary of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), the student union wing of the RSS, which claims 50,000 MU students as its members.

ABVP has planned a protest rally on the university’s suburban campus at Kalina on August 30. Moreover, the Maharashtra Navnirman Vidyarthi Sena — the students’ wing of Raj Thakeray’s Maharashtra Navnirman Sena — has threatened to storm the office of the vice chancellor, if results are delayed any further.

Harried MU administrators attribute delays in completing assessments within the prescribed time limit to severe manpower shortage and infrastructural deficiencies. “We still have the same number of employees as 10-15 years ago despite the number of enrolled students having risen by 47 percent to 715,000 during the past decade, due to the state government’s budgetary constraints,” says M.A. Khan, registrar of MU.

The real problem is that although the MU’s budgetary outlay has risen from Rs.465.20 crore in 2015-16 to Rs.639.54 crore in 2016-17, the varsity is experiencing cash flow problems because over the past few years, the state government has been paying merely 75 percent of the salary grant it is expected to pay the varsity. According to MU insiders, the state government owes the university Rs.252 crore as arrears. The vice chancellor Sanjay Deshmukh, has repeatedly implored education minister, Vinod Tawde and chief minister, Devendra Fadnavis to release Rs.100 crore to pay employees salary arrears.

MU’s budgetary constraints and cash-flow squeeze have prompted the administration to resort to employing relatively low-paid temporary non-teaching staff whose productivity is poor, and loyalty and commitment to the varsity’s goals and deadlines suspect. Moreover, the pitiful amounts it pays evaluators and answer scripts assessors is a disincentive to the best among them.

“Examiners and moderators were paid Rs.8 per answer script until March, though remuneration has been increased to Rs.16 and Rs.20 for undergraduate and postgraduate courses. This has resulted in shoddy marking and delays in declaring the final results all these years. The vice chancellor and education minister need to be held accountable for inflicting unnecessary hardship on students,” says Vihar Durve, a Pune-based education activist who has been researching MU’s assessment and evaluation system for the past six years.

Curiously, the state government, MU faculty and students are silent on the issue of raising students’ rock-bottom tuition fees to bail out this beleaguered varsity. That’s a political hot potato.

Dipta Joshi (Mumbai)