Osmania University vice-chancellor D. Ravinder said that admissions for all those who registered for Ph.D before 2017 stand cancelled if they have not submitted their thesis so far, and the existing Ph.D students have to complete their work by June 2023.
After exhausting the present registered candidates, the varsity will conduct a fresh entrance exam in 2023 to fill up the vacancies in each department, the vice-chancellor said at a press conference on Saturday.
Prof. Ravinder denied that students’ voices were being suppressed saying that the university welcomed intellectual debates and discussions rather than those with a political motive. Permission for Rahul Gandhi’s proposed meeting with students was declined on various grounds, including the political angle, since the university has decided to keep politics away from the campus.
However, the varsity is open for debates and a new facility — Students’ Discourse Centre — has been created where students can conduct meetings or call speakers from outside for discussions and debates on issues concerning education, society and the country. “The image of Arts College cannot take a beating because a few students want to misuse the premises as we owe an explanation to the society,” he argued.
Prof. Ravinder, who completed one year in office, launched several initiatives and introduced major reforms to bring the varsity out of the image created during the separate Telangana movement and ensure students and faculty achieve professional excellence.
Sharing his views on the new initiatives and proposals that included advanced teaching-learning facilities, student amenities and infrastructure development, he said the idea was to bring back the glory of the university. A pylon is being constructed to celebrate the century-old university and its contribution to the society.
“We want to send civil servants from the varsity and a result of that initiative was the launch of Civil Services Academy,” he said, adding that another academic initiative was the adoption of Cluster System with a cluster of nine colleges which would facilitate students pursuing courses in different colleges.
He said that the university has constructed a 300 capacity girls’ hostel at ₹11 crore at Nizam College and a 500 capacity boys’ hostel at ₹26 crore was converted into a girls’ hostel.
The research segment has been augmented with the institution of the Annual Vice-Chancellor Award to encourage the faculty to take up research and a Research Corpus Fund was created to provide seed money to teachers and scholars.
The establishment of the Institute of Indo-Pacific studies, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar Research Centre and the Centre for Telangana Studies will give a fillip to research in social sciences, he said.
