Mohindra College, Patiala, fails to comply with ICAR norms, loses BSc (Honours) Agriculture course

Ravneet Singh

Patiala, April 7

Unavailability of faculty and farm land among other reasons as mandated by the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) rules have left the four-year course of BSc (Honours) in Agriculture at various government colleges in the agrarian state of Punjab shut. The colleges which failed to admit students for the past three years due to their failure to fulfil the norms, will no longer offer the course after the final-year students complete the course and leave the colleges within a month.

Of the five government colleges where the course has been shut, Government Mohindra College, Patiala, had launched the BSc Agriculture course in 2013, which was later converted to BSc (Honours) Agriculture with 150 seats. The problems started emerging after the Punjab State Council for Agricultural Education notified ICAR’s guidelines for affiliation of colleges running courses in agriculture in January 2019.

A faculty member said, “Shutting down of the course will leave us out of jobs.”

Hemant Watts, president of Higher Education Institutes Society Employees’ Association, said the course was being run in five government colleges in Hoshiarpur, Tanda, Faridkot, Patiala and Muktsar sahib. “All these colleges failed to admit students due to lack of affiliation,” he said and added, “The conditions are not being fulfilled by private institutions as well but they are running the same course at more than double the fees and four times the seats.”

Jaspreet Talwar, Principal Secretary Department of Higher Education, said, “The colleges are not able to admit students due to lack of affiliation. We are now pushing with the UGC to allow the colleges to function with affiliation from multiple universities, including Punjab Agricultural University, as at present, the affiliation is allowed with one university only.”