Odisha’s Private engineering schools flooded with payment aid requests, stare at disaster

Express News Service
BHUBANESWAR:  Hit by a pandemic that has had a cascading impact on lives and livelihood, personal skilled schools are being flooded with requests for payment discount or deferred cost from college students within the State.  The establishments are, resultantly, caught in a precarious scenario – declining enrolment and low realisation of charges.

Around 80,000 college students pursue technical programs in numerous engineering schools and establishments within the State. With courses transferring to on-line mode, a lot of college students are but to deposit their semester charges, main income for technical institutes. To handle the disaster, some schools have decreased employees power; many scaled down employees wage and delayed mortgage reimbursement to banks in addition to contribution to workers’ provident fund as a short lived measure.

At National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST), Berhampur the place the coed power is round 3,500, near 52 per cent charges have remained uncollected, authorities declare. “Fees are normally collected at beginning of odd and even semesters. However, with institute remaining shut and classes in online mode, fees are yet to be paid by a number of students,” stated NIST Director Prof Sangram Mudali.

The promoter of a Bhubaneswar-based engineering institute which has near 250 college students on rolls of its diploma engineering courses stated, only one has made the cost within the final one yr and a half. For a university of NIST’s scale, with 150 instructing employees and an equal variety of non-teaching employees, wage and different fastened overheads should be paid by the administration of the autonomous institute.

“Even if classes continue in online mode, it is not free. We need to pay the teachers who have continued the learning process during the challenging times. At the same time, we have a large number of Class IV employees who are sitting idle due to the pandemic. We cannot remove them as they have been with us for over 15-20 years,” stated the NIST director. Instead of eradicating any worker, the administration needed to scale down the remuneration of the employees to take care of the disaster.

For technical schools having lesser enrolment, the plight is worse and a few are relying on Covid loans. Einstein Academy of Technology and Management authorities say requests for deferment of charges regardless of a 15 per discount has put them on a slippery monitor.

“A number of students are yet to deposit their fees due to various reasons but there are at least 10 of them who are not in a position to pay at all due to death of earning members in their family during the pandemic. We cannot ask them on humanitarian grounds. In such a situation we have been forced to depend on Covid loan to pay salary and meet other expenses,” Chairman Basant Kumar Bisoi stated.

Odisha has round 34,000 B Tech seats of which round 29,700 are with 88 personal engineering schools. However, a staggering 25,000 seats, about 84 per cent of the entire consumption of personal engineering schools, remained vacant in 2020-21 after completion of admission by Odisha Joint Entrance Committee (OJEE) in November final yr. Later, the seats had been handed over to the universities for enrollment at their stage.

Most schools have infrastructure to take care of, in contrast to authorities schools that are funded by the state. Then there are fleets of buses, electrical energy, water, web, phone payments to be paid. Secretary of Odisha Private Engineering College Association (OPECA) Binod Das stated, most universities have availed 20 per cent further mortgage on their complete quantity to be paid with curiosity at a later stage to maintain the disaster, whereas others are utilising surplus funds to tide over the disaster.

The Biju Patnaik University of Technology (BPUT) to which the engineering schools are affiliated, says it has little position to play. Vice-Chancellor CR Tripathy stated BPUT has restricted position in monetary issues of constituent schools. OPECA, nonetheless, claims that the college just isn’t returning the pledge cash schools had deposited a decade again.