Panjab University’s Crisis

On 11 April 2017, Panjab University (PU) narrowly escaped from witnessing a bloody Baisakhi. It was engulfed by a whirlpool of politicking, financial crunch, and student unrest. Students were agitating against the university’s fee hike in courses across disciplines. Education, they argued, needed to be provided by the government free of cost. Education in PU, however, was never provided free of cost at any point of time in its long history. It was being run on the basis of tuition and examination fees collected from a large number of students enrolled in its various affiliated schools, colleges and departments/centres on campus, with the deficit being financed by the state and central governments. 

When the matriculation examination was taken out of the fold of PU in 1969, the internally generated finances from the tuition fees collected from a large number of school students ceased, leading to a proportionate increase in its deficit budget. The establishment of Guru Nanak Dev University at Amritsar in 1969 further dented the financial resources of PU by taking away a large number of its affiliated colleges that contributed significantly towards its indigenous finances. Once the colleges located in the jurisdiction of Haryana were also taken away, the financial health of PU deteriorated severely.