Ex-IAS officer to probe irregularities in PTU

Deepkamal Kaur

Tribune News Service

Jalandhar, May 8

The Department of Technical Education has begun a massive cleanup exercise at IK Gujral Punjab Technical University by appointing retired IAS officer SS Dhillon as an inquiry officer to look into a huge number of complaints of financial irregularities at the campus.

The new Technical Education Secretary and officiating VC of the varsity, KS Pannu, passed the orders today. A Haryana-cadre officer of the 1984 batch, Dhillon has been asked to complete the inquiry in a month’s time.

In his order, Pannu said, “A large number of very serious complaints related to various financial and administrative irregularities in the varsity have been received over a period of time. Many of the complaints are supported with affidavits. It has been observed that no tangible inquiry about these complaints has been conducted. In view of the above, SS Dhillon, one of the officer on the panel of inquiry officers approved by Punjab government is appointed as the inquiry officer to look into all the pending complaints.”

Pannu has asked Acting Registrar Amanpreet Singh to act as presenting officer before the inquiry officer and assist him in providing necessary documents and other relevant material.

Meanwhile, Pannu has also taken charge of Controller of Examination from an officer and handed it over to Joint Registrar RPS Bedi.

Most of the complaints pertain to allegations levelled by the Anti-Corruption Society. The chief of the society, JK Anand, had alleged that former VC Dr Rajneesh Arora, who had RSS leanings, had done favours for the sangh by appointing their kin in the university.

Anand had complained to former Chief Secretary Sarvesh Kaushal, “In order to siphon huge corpus funds, Dr Arora found a novel idea of appointing consultants. He appointed his old friend and classmate Parveen Kumar and his company NetIIT as consultant to PTU among some other consultants.”

An amount of Rs 24.37 crore was released to him. Parveen was given works related to academics, examination, auditing and preparing ranking for the affiliated colleges.

Another matter to be probed pertains to a complaint moved by lawyer HC Arora into the high number of re-evaluations and reappears at the varsity.

Over 80 per cent of the BTech students were applying for re-evaluation whereas the percentage of similar cases stood at just 5 per cent in other universities.