While rest of the world is ascending to new heights of technological development, the education sector of Kashmir is still struggling for its sustenance, given the messing up of education with politics, for some ‘vested interests’.
It is almost a year now that the engineering students of the University of Kashmir, north Campus have been crying to get their department merged with other engineering departments at the main campus of Universities Zakura College of Engineering as per the norm.
When the University of Kashmir started its own engineering college in 2009, the department of Computer Sciences was temporarily shifted to Universities North Campus at Delina Baramulla. However when the College of Engineering is fully functional now, the department of Computer Sciences is still disintegrated.
Since various departments of engineering like Electronics and Communication, Mechanical Engineering and the Department of Computer Sciences are all complementary, this ‘exiled’ department should normally have been patched up quickly with the rest of departments after the establishment of the College of Engineering. The unification is also understandable when it comes to the maintenance of the propriety of the engineering college thereby sharing of equipments, tools, technologies, faculty and ideas with students of other engineering departments, as happens in other engineering colleges across the country.
“Its quite comprehensible that all the engineering departments should work under a single roof as other medical colleges have various departments working together. Just like dragging a department, say cardiology from the rest of medical college to work in isolation sounds absurd, similarly the ostracism of our department is also very unsound.” an engineering student shared.
The failure of integration of this department with the rest of college has put the career of students at stake by telling-upon the quality of education. This lone department of engineering at North Campus has failed to provide an ‘engineering atmosphere’ to its students given its non-gregarious state.
Another girl sharing her grievance said, “we have to work in substandard laboratories with lack of the basic infrastructure. We have least exposure to workshops, technical festivals, seminars and other conferences creating a void in our attainment of practical knowledge.”
Who is responsible for this obligatory amalgamation?
In curtailment of the unification of this department, the political reasons, playing a key role, surfaced when ruling PDP (Peoples Demoratic Party) member, Muzzafar Beigh’s nephew, MLA Javaid Beigh, allegedly ‘threatened’ Vice Chancellor of the University of Kashmir over phone saying “If the Computer Sciences department is shifted to Engineering College at Srinagar, I will myself burn tyres on the roads of Baramulla”.
Vice-Chancellor, Khurshid Andrabi had called for a meeting on the decision of transferring the Computer Sciences department from Delina Bramulla to its main campus at Zakura, Srinagar after which he had received the threat call and became impotent at the hands of politics.
‘In want of protecting his vote bank’ former MLA Rafiabad, Javaid Dar wants to have this engineering department functional in his area only, without being bothered by the idea of risking the career of more than 250 students.
Education sector in Kashmir has become the casualty of politics with mixing up of the two and woe being the crippling of the guardians of education by politicians and the suffering of academic excellence.