Hyderabad: In October last year, the foundation stone was laid for the fourth campus of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), a scientific research institute founded by Homi Bhabha with support from the Dorabji Tata Trust, at the University of Hyderabad (UoH).
A faculty member says: "TIFR's other campuses in Mumbai, Pune and Bangalore put together do not exceed 75 acres. It is not clear why it requires 199.28 acres in Hyderabad."
Similar views were expressed by students and other faculty members. They seem quite determined to say what they perceive as an issue that would affect the university's expansion. UoH is just 40 years old and, being a young university, it has a great scope to expand further in engineering and medicine, they say. The students and faculty members have also joined hands to form forums like 'Save University of Hyderabad campaign'.
UoH Vice-Chancellor Seyed Ehtesham Hasnain, however, sees a positive synergy in it. "The Andhra Pradesh government invited TIFR to the state and we thought there could be a wonderful synergy between TIFR and UoH. The state issued an order and, as the land is owned by it, it transferred 200 acres to TIFR," he says
This is not the only instance where difference of opinion has cropped up over the land issue at the university. Similar hassles surrounded the 200-acre Knowledge and Innovation Park (KIP) and the over-200-acre Care Foundation, a corporate medical organisation.
The Care Foundation had proposed to set up a National Institute of Health Sciences and Translational Research, but the proposal was scrapped. The vice-chancellor was forced to appoint a three-member committee of Ranbir Singh, a Srikrishna Committee member and a former vice-chancellor of the Nalsar University; Padmanabhan Balaram from the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore; and former Nizam's Institute of Medical Sciences Director Kakarla Subba Rao.
"The committee decided that the university did not have the basic facility to enter into a research collaboration with the Care Foundation. The recommendation was based on a wide consultation with students, teachers and non-teaching staff. The committee asked the university to scrap the proposal," Purendra Prasad, secretary of the UoH Teachers Association and reader in the department of Sociology, says.
The controversial KIP, the university's proposed profit-making company under Section 3 of the Company's Act, too, was put off. KIP, according to Hasnain, was planned on the lines of Cambridge University, Oxford University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with UoH holding 89 per cent in the project and the state government 11 per cent equity share.
The university's corpus is Rs 50 crore at present. Hasnain had a vision of taking the corpus to Rs 500 crore by December 2010, when his term was to originally end. He is now on an extension until March. The fund was Rs 16 crore in 2006, when he had joined.
Justifying the allocation, Hasnain said KIP was better than "giving away land to dubious institutions like International Management Group (IMG)."
Florida-based IMG Academies had proposed to build a Rs 700-crore IMG Bharat Academy, the country's largest sports academy, in the city. The project was scrapped after protests and the state government returned 397 acres given to IMG to the university. Another three acres is yet to be returned.
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Between 1975 and 2006, the university parted with 782.30 acres, already transferred to various projects. UoH had came up on 2,300 acres allotted to it by the state government in 1975.
The administration claims that the university was only a de facto owner of the land, not the de jure owner as the land was legally owned by the Andhra government in the revenue records. It could only access it for educational research purposes.
Some projects, however, are coming up with little opposition. One such is the Institute of Life Sciences (ILS), a research organisation launched in 2003 by the Andhra government, UoH and Dr Reddy's Laboratories.
"In ILS, there was never a controversy over land, as it was a small parcel of 10 acres. The controversy was in terms of commitments over MoU guidelines on payment issues," Prasad says.
Source: Business Standard