GROWTH, WE HAVE SEEN. BHU NEEDS TO DEVELOP NOW.

Basic concept of 'growth and development' applies well to BHU. It has grown even during the years when all the debate of its academic decline started emerging and gradually formed a sustainable trend. But it seems it has stopped developing. The claims that BHU of the day can boast of, are just like some dimming bright spots consistently loosing their sheen in the widening administrative Goliath.

Faculties, departments, number of students, infrastructure, campus area and the so-called South Campus, everything has seen the upward curve but the number and quality of placements, pedagogy and faculty standard.

Here I want to make it clear that these are not lines just to vent out any anger if I have. It is due to my respect to this great institution that I am compelled to write these lines.

These are as true as existence of BHU. These are hard statistical facts.

IMS and IT, two noticeable entities, have seen worst what an academic entity can see. IMS had to cancel its first merit list of MBBS students some years ago while IT has been marred with controversial student deaths and suicide cases due to its placements ring. Add the feather to the cap with appointment of new IT director, a controversial figure whose name has done rounds for being involved in scam in his previous institution.

How can we expect such steps are going to sustain what Mahamana had envisioned once?

BHU is growing but has stopped developing. The university that has around 120 departments, some advance science research centers, many standard labs, a big enough library and ample of infrastructure support, has to be content with placement figures of just IT. Why can't it make it's other courses at par with IT matching its good placement figures. Go and ask a normal UG or PG student with hope of getting placement and the answer will be!--probably we all know.

To counter it, some of us can talk of BHU Law School, IMS and Institute of Agricultural Sciences as being in top ranks. But these numbers are limited to these words only. Compare their placement level with any of individual departments of India's five most prestigious universities and the truth will be naked, before everyone's eyes.

An academic institution can only grow when its intellectual pool of teachers and students grow in harmony but this balance seems long gone. Still BHU has remarkable names in both categories, still many of its students are making big in their professional arena, and still some of the outgoing students are able to make a good beginning. But the numbers representing the last category are so poor that we need desperate measures.

So, the rigour in selection is there with more or less redone syllabi now but the coursework and syllabi realization have become a temperamental problem, based on long years of internal talent in-breeding in the university subsequently transferred to the mass of incoming talent pool.

The university needs to address this problem immediately and alumnus is needed to have make a timely active intervention; intervention that talks of consciousness out of attachment, but devoid of its political underpinnings.

Growth, we have seen. BHU needs to develop now.