Communist-ruled West Bengal’s 18th and newest varsity — West Bengal State University (WBSU) — which since its inception on September 22 last year, has been the butt of jibes and jokes from snobbish elements within Kolkata’s academic community, mainly because of its “backward” location 30 km north of the city’s airport, has got off to a good start. Sited on a scenic 30-acre campus with three water bodies, this sylvan backdrop is devoid of urban glamour, but it has proved a boon for the educationally deprived young adults of the socio-economically backward North 24 Parganas district.
Currently 30 departments including physics, mathematics, statistics, Bengali, history, economics are operational with 1,210 postgrad students on the university rolls. Moreover by a firman of the state legislative assembly, 57 undergraduate colleges with an aggregate student enrolment of 34,000 students sited in the North 24-Parganas district — the second largest (pop. 8.9 million) of West Bengal’s 19 districts — have been hived off from Calcutta University and affiliated with WBSU. “We’ve got off to a fine start with an excellent team of teachers in place,” enthuses Ashoke Ranjan Thakur, an alumnus of Calcutta University and hitherto pro vice chancellor of Jadavpur University, Kolkata who was appointed the first vice chancellor of WBSU last year.
To Thakur’s credit, somewhat unusually, when WBSU was formally inaugurated last September, its Centre for Studies in Local Ecology, History and Culture (CSLEHC) was started simultaneously.
Comments associate professor of zoology Dr. Silanjan Bhattacharya and the prime mover behind CSLEHC: “The North 24-Parganas district has a very rich and complex ecology, which has remained largely unexplored and underdeveloped, and offers excellent research opportunities in the areas of oral culture, traditions and history. Our research programme will take a socio-ecological approach to the study of the district with the objective of preserving and recovering the local identity and traditional ecological knowledge by creating archives and museums, as well as producing historical narratives.”
Cynical academics in Kolkata attribute the unusually swift decision of the CPM-led Left Front government which has ruled West Bengal (pop. 80 million) since 1977 during which period it has driven the state’s once highly respected education system to the bottom rungs of the Education Development Index of the National University of Educational Planning and Administration, Delhi, not to a new-found love of learning, but to political considerations. With the Mamta Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress tipped to oust the CPM and its Left allies in the next state assembly elections scheduled for March 2011, the peremptory establishment of WBSU in the backward North 24 Parganas district is a populist political move of the CPM leadership to recover lost ground.
“If like their tutors and mentors across the border (in Communist China) the CPM was running a dictatorship of the proletariat, WBSU would never have seen the light of day. But fortunately in India, the CPM has to win free and fair elections. That’s why it has belatedly become aware of the woefully neglected education needs of West Bengal’s youth. But it’s a case of too little too late. It’ll still be curtains for the CPM come 2011,” says a disillu-sioned professor of Calcutta University who preferred to remain anonymous.
But either way, the long-neglected youth of the North 24-Parganas who have been suddenly gifted a full-fledged university aren’t complaining. Hopefully they will become more appreciative of Indian democracy.
Sujoy Gupta (Kolkata)