There’s some good news for university students in the distant suburbs. The University of Mumbai (MU) has been allocated a large plot of land in the Vasai-Virar region to set up a sub-centre there.
The transfer of the land and the planning for a new set-up there will take a while. But officials suggested that university is considering a multi-disciplinary centre with a special emphasis on research in the science stream.
The set-up will also house administrative facilities to cater to the requirements of students attending courses in colleges in the region who otherwise had to travel a long way to the university’s offices at Kalina, Santacruz, for any little work, the officials explained.
The decision to allocate the 100 acres to the university was confirmed in a resolution by the Vasai-Virar Municipal Corporation, and conveyed officially to the university only recently.
“For any university-related work students have to travel all the way from Vasai to Kalina, where the university’s main administrative campus is located. It is tiresome as well as a wastage of time,” said an official, requesting not to be named. The Mumbai university, one of the oldest in the country, supervises the activities of about 600 colleges across the state, but it has just one sub-centre at Ratnagiri.
The university has a plot in Thane, where a sub-centre has been planned also. But work has not started yet as there are no funds for the purpose. “We have only managed to construct a security wall around the six acre plot in the past year. We want to have an administrative building there and are waiting for funds from the technical and higher education department,” the official said. The university has set aside about Rs10 crore in its budget, the official explained, but this is inadequate to do very much.
