Reshma Ravishanker (Bengaluru)
Shivakumar: “financially unviable”
The financial burden of fulfilling its five 2023 legislative assembly election guarantees — 200 units of free power for every applicant household, 10 kg rice per person in below poverty line (BPL) households, free-of-charge travel for women in government buses, Rs.2,000 per month for women heads of family and Rs.3,000 for unemployed graduates — is evidently proving too heavy for the two-year-old Congress government of Karnataka (pop. 70 million).
In early March, Karnataka’s deputy chief minister D.K. Shivakumar announced that the government is contemplating closure of nine newly established universities (less than five years old) because they are not “financially viable”. Shivakumar heads a cabinet sub-committee reviewing state universities. The nine universities under the scanner — Hassan, Chamarajanagar, Haveri, Kodagu, Koppal, Bagalkot, Maharani Cluster, Mandya and Nrupathunga — were established by the previous BJP government to make higher education accessible to students in the under-served northern districts of Karnataka.
Proof that funds crunch is the prime factor behind the imminent decision to shutter the nine new universities is provided by the state government’s unofficial freeze on all faculty recruitment. According to the state’s department of higher education, 4,600 teaching and non-teaching posts are vacant in Karnataka’s 32 public universities. The 76-year-old Karnatak University has the highest number of vacant positions statewide totaling 1,263, followed by Bangalore University’s 1,006 vacancies.
The Congress government’s proposal to shut down nine newly promoted public universities has not only aroused the ire of students in Karnataka’s under-developed hinterland, but also of the high powered Forum of Former Vice Chancellors. On March 20, in a letter addressed to Chief Minister Siddaramaiah, the forum comprising four incumbent VCs, 17 former VCs and deans of public, deemed and private universities, urged the government to reconsider its proposal.
“After detailed discussion and deliberations, it was unanimously resolved to seek (sic) that the Karnataka government take a prudent decision of not closing down/merger of few of the universities, but to take affirmative action for capacity building and strengthening of all the nine universities in a phased manner to the benefit of students from backward districts of Karnataka which has a low gross enrollment ratio (GER),” they wrote, while presenting an action plan for the nine universities to start self-financing (full-fees) study programmes to augment revenue.
Dr. Chetan Singai, Professor and Dean at the School of Law, Governance & Public Policy, Chanakya University, Bengaluru, entertains no doubt that the two-year-old Congress government’s decision to shutter the new universities is rooted in mismanagement and misdirection of the relatively wealthy state’s revenue (Rs.2.57 lakh crore in 2024-25) to fund “populist schemes”. “These universities on the chopping block are sited in educationally backward districts. They were established to provide students living in these areas access to higher education, as many of them were forced to migrate to higher education institutions in Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Tamil Nadu. NEP 2020 directs state governments to establish a university in every district to provide youth in tier-II and tier-III cities and rural areas employment-oriented higher education programmes, not necessarily to evolve into big-budget research universities. The state government is being hasty in wanting to shut down these new universities. Instead, it should prepare a five-year vision plan to develop infrastructure, recruit faculty, etc in these universities. But to implement this plan, it has to practice prudent financial management,” says Singai.
Obliged to raise the prices of milk, electricity, metro fares, diesel to fulfill its pre-election 2023 promises, the state’s Congress government is wedged between a rock and hard place. As we go to press, deputy CM Shivakumar has announced a new plan for the nine universities to be merged with their parent universities. But this band-aid solution doesn’t address the larger malaise of vacant faculty positions, poor quality of education and infrastructure in the state’s under-funded 32 public universities — of whom only seven are sufficiently well-reputed to be included in the EW Government University Rankings 2025-26 league table (see pg. 78).