THREE YEARS ON AFTER IT ended 34 years of rule of the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPM) led-Left Front government in West Bengal (pop. 91 million) with a landslide majority in the state legislative election of 2011, the Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress government has yet to redeem its promise to restore West Bengal’s universities — widely acclaimed as the country’s best until the mid-1970s — to their pristine glory.

One of the promises was to discontinue the practice of routine reservation by top-ranked elite universities of postgraduate seats for their own graduates. Shortly after she was sworn-in as chief minister, Banerjee proposed a common entrance test (CET) for admission into postgrad programmes of all colleges and state-funded universities. But three years hence, the much-hyped CET is still in cold storage with little prospect of it being conducted this year either.

The West Bengal Council for Higher Education (WBCHE), the nodal authority for conducting the examination is dragging its feet, citing inadequate manpower. “We will continue with last year’s process and ask universities to take 60 percent of postgrad students from affiliated colleges and fill the remaining seats from other varsities,” says Malayendu Saha, vice chairman of the council. This despite his predecessor Sugato Marjit’s promise to conduct CET for postgraduate admissions this year.

Sukanta Bhattacharya, associate professor of economics at the University of Calcutta, is persuaded that CET for postgrad admissions is a dead letter. “Universities are autonomous institutions with differing and distinctive undergraduate and postgrad syllabuses and curriculums. It’s natural for them to admit students who they believe can cope with their curriculums and organisational culture,” he comments.

Moreover, a major cause of antipathy to the proposed CET is that students who have made it into the undergrad programmes of elite standalone Presidency and Jadavpur universities, far from welcome the prospect of writing CET to be re-admitted into these preferred institutions.

Even proponents of the proposed CET are beginning to entertain doubts. Prithwis Mukherjee, programme director of business analytics at the Praxis Business School, who was in favour of “a well-designed CET conducted by an independent third party”, is disheartened by the delay in actioning the proposal which could have given students from outside the establishment a chance to enter the state’s best (and highly subsidised) universities on merit. “Even if we can get going with a state-level CET in West Bengal, I am now sure that it will be so full of holes and incompetencies that it won’t be worth the effort. A single admission test is likely to be the target of all evil forces,” he says.

Vested interests can — and will — always oppose poriborton (change).
Baishali Mukherjee (Kolkata)