PATNA: Even as the governor’s secretariat instructed the banks and the treasuries to unfreeze the bank accounts of the universities and ensure payment of salaries to the vice-chancellors (VCs) and other officials, the standoff between the state education department and the chancellor’s secretariat continued on Monday, with the education department lodging FIRs against vice-chancellors and other officials of universities for skipping the department’s meetings.
According to the reports, FIRs have been lodged against the officials of B N Mandal University, Madhepura; Tilka Manjhi Bhagalpur University; B R A Bihar University, Muzaffarpur, and Veer Kunwar Singh University, Ara. However, there is no report of any FIR lodged against Patna University, Patliputra University, Aryabhatta Knowledge University and Maulana Mazharul Haq Arabic and Persian University so far.
Meanwhile, the education department has ordered auditing of accounts of all the universities by its own auditors. Separate teams of auditors have already been constituted for each university and the registrars of the universities have been instructed by the department to make available all the relevant data regarding salaries, arrears of salaries, expenditure, purchases, etc to the auditing team.
The education department has also announced separate workshops on online entry of relevant data on the website of All India Survey for Higher Education.
The workshops will be attended by the nodal officers of all the universities in phases. The workshops will be held between March 6 and 20.
The first workshop would be organised at L N Mishra Institute of Economic Development and Social change on March 6 for the nodal officers of Maulana Mazharul Haq Arabic and Persian, Patliputra and Patna universities, said education department sources.
The tussle between the education department and the chancellor’s secretariat took a new turn on Thursday when the education department ordered freezing of the bank accounts of universities and stopping salary payment of vice-chancellors, who did not turn up at a review meeting convened by the department.
Taking strong objection to the department’s action, the chancellor’s secretariat wrote a letter to the state’s chief secretary to initiate action against the education department officials for issuing such orders, ignoring the authority of the chancellor. In fact, the university officials did not attend the meeting following the direction of the chancellor, the letter said.
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