The top-brass of Sri Venkateswara University, which was in a spot till Sunday due to lack of funds to pay salaries and pension to its staff members for the month of March, even ten days after the start of the month, got a reprieve, at least for the next twenty days.
After that, the management would be in the same spot yet again to meet the wage and pension bills of its employees for the month of April, if the State government fails to respond to its SoS to release its blocked grants worth Rs. 10 crore to Rs. 12 crore, due for the first quarter of the current fiscal, without any more delay.
As for the salary and pension bills of its staff for March, the university management cleared them on Monday.
The university had to dash off letters to the Principals of all the University Colleges on Friday to immediately transfer Rs. 4 crore to the university account from their accounts as pending tuition fee and maintenance fee for the period 2007-08 to 2010-11. With the principals quickly responding and paying up the required sum of Rs. 4 crore on Monday, the university management met the ‘emergency' after mobilising some more funds from its own sources. A top university source said that it was a perennial problem which needed to be addressed on a permanent basis because if the uncertainty like this over the university's financial health was allowed to continue, besides affecting the academic atmosphere on the campus, it would also present the university and the State government in a poor light.
The source attributed the financial stringency in the university to the rapid shrinkage in its territory over the past few years with the government setting up a university each in the districts of Nellore and Kadapa, which were once under the ambit of the SVU. Though government's intention was decentralisation, it did impact the university's revenues badly.
With new universities coming up, the territory of SVU got shrunk so much that it was left with only Chittoor district and correspondingly the number of affiliated colleges under its control also had dwindled to a mere 180 from the 500-odd colleges.
Affiliated colleges supply the life-blood to the universities for their existence in the form of affiliation charges, inspection fee, examination fee and so on.
Any cut in the area of operation of a university and the consequent fall in the number of affiliated colleges under its ambit, would have a direct impact on its revenues from these sources.
And that is what has happened in the SVU resulting in acute financial crisis.
