With the new academic session starting next year, all the students will have to prove their eligibility and competency in order to secure enrolment in any of the Tribhuvan University (TU) constituent and affiliated colleges.

The ‘Five Year Strategic Plan’ endorsed by the TU Senate on Sunday has a provision to limit the intake of students and make it mandatory for them to sit the entrance examination for all the faculties.

Concluding that the high number of student enrolment has actually hampered efforts to produce quality and competitive human resource, the university has decided to fix class sizes and have sizeable intake of new students. Currently, students are not required to take entrance examination to get enrolment in the TU colleges except for medicine, engineering and a few programmes in management and law.

“From the next academic session, TU will have fixed student intake, entrance examinations and fixed class sizes,” said TU’s Acting Rector Chinta Mani Pokhrel while presenting the Plan.

He claimed that the strategic plan has been introduced in response to the aspirations for improving the quality of education it has been providing and intends to bring changes in the current planning, programming and delivering academic progress.

The Plan also envisions the implementation of academic calendar, timely update of curriculum and integration of ICT in teaching-learning process, credit transfer, among others.

The Plan has set decentralised governance, equity and inclusiveness, performance-based incentives, researched-based education, quality-focused pedagogy, transparency, responsiveness, accountability, collaboration, cooperation, coordination, resource generation and financial sustainability for the university.

“A separate monitoring cell will be formed for quality assurance purposes,” reads the plan.

The Senate also endorsed a Rs 10.23 billion budget for the fiscal year 2014/15, two months after the due date. The budget is almost 100 percent increase compared to Rs 5.80 billion for the last fiscal year. Though the TU Senate last year had asked the government to release Rs 6.68 billion, the government had only allocated Rs 5.80 billion.

Of the total budget, Rs 2.63 billion will be managed by internal sources while remaining Rs 7.60 billion has to be allocated by the government. However, looking at the past trends, it is unlikely that the government will release the amount endorsed by the Senate.

According to TU Registrar Chandra Mani Poudel, of the total Capital expenditure Rs 5.72 billion will be used for salary and retirement benefits.

The Plan also aims to deposit some Rs 260 million in the Pension Fund to provide gratuity and other retirement benefits for TU’s retiring staff. The oldest university of the country has been facing problems in managing the pension for its employees owing to a lack of adequate government funding.

source: Binod Ghimire, The Kathmandu post, 8 sept 2014