Decades of neglect: The falling fortunes of Punjabi University, Patiala

The Bhai Kahn Singh Nabha Library of Punjabi University, Patiala, or PUP, seems a haunted home to old books and archaic computers. The library promises knowledge and wisdom to scholars. However, it is far away from fulfilling its promise.

The BKSN library and the university at large has been suffering from a funds crunch for decades. Beginning in the early 1990s, its troubles worsened with the birth of the new millennium. Since 2013-14, this university has been taking loans in order to survive.

It was established on April 30, 1962, with the mandate to keep alive Punjabi history, its language, art, literature, and culture. It is hardly able to follow that mandate. Generations of prominent figures passed through its halls, including Surjit Patar, former finance ministers, and other MPs, as well as artists, bureaucrats and writers.

Now, the university itself needs fuel, perhaps requiring a booster shot, to keep on going.

Spread across 500 acres of land, PUP has over 14,000 students enrolled, most of them coming from marginalised sections. For its 2020-21 academic session, it enrolled 4,010 students from scheduled castes, of which 2,371 were female.

“Today, when a landless labourer’s daughter comes here, she feels she belongs here. She does not feel out of place [while] going to a postgraduate class,” said Dr Arvind, vice chancellor of the varsity.

PUP employs around 565 teachers. On February 6, the teachers’ union wrote to Arvind, saying they hadn’t received their salaries for December and January. “I have to now worry about how to give this month’s salaries to the employees,” Arvind said. “The crisis is, however, the tip of the iceberg.”

PUP has a loan of Rs 150 crore or overdraft from SBI. “Each month, it has to pay about a crore and a half, as interest or penal charges to that loan,” Arvind said. “Then it has Rs 100 crore pending liabilities that include standing payments, retirement benefits, arrears, health reimbursements and payment to companies.”

The tragedy is that “even prize money to students is a liability on the university,” he said.

This explains why its library looks the way it does. As poet Zafar Kamali once wrote: “Kitabon se agar Khali Makaan hai. Wo hai bhooton ka maskan ghar kahan hai.” Home without books is no home. Rather, it’s ghosts’ dome.

Litany of woes

It’s been a decade since Professor Rajesh Sharma, 57, of the department of English has visited the library. “However excellent our library is,” he told me, “it has not updated itself to the level where a university is supposed to.” Last year, a fund of merely Rs 7,200 was allotted for the English section of the library.

“Sometimes, a single book would cost us Rs 10,000-15,000, and if we are to read half of a book a year, then I would not want to go to the library,” Sharma added. This, when the library carries the name of Bhai Kahn Singh Nabha, a literary arbiter who inspired generations in Punjabi academia and education. However, the library does not inspire confidence anymore.

In 2021-22, its authorities proposed a budget of Rs 16 lakh, in order to buy books. The budget was finally settled at Rs 5 lakh – which is what the government says it spends over two months on a single MP.

Punjabi University, Patiala calls itself the second largest university in the world to be named after a language. The largest is the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. And since the former draws the comparison itself, this reporter contacted Professor Reuven Amitai, the chairperson of HUJ’s Library Authority.

He said, “I can say that our budget for acquisitions and subscriptions has remained stable now for several years in real terms.”

The Hebrew University’s Library Authority is responsible for eight libraries on their four campuses. Of them, Bloomfield Library for the Humanities and Social Sciences alone purchases about 2,500 volumes a year.

“About a quarter of these books are in Hebrew, 10 percent are in Arabic, while the rest are mostly in English, French, German, Italian and Spanish. We also have a collection of books in South Asian languages – both classical (mainly Sanskrit) and modern (mainly Hindi I believe, also in several other languages of India). The National Library of Israel [also on HUJ campus] buys books in Urdu as well,” Amitai added.

They also receive additional budgets for special projects, such as the digitalisation of large map collections, the organisation and preservation of archival material in HUJ’s holdings, and the acquisition through gifts [by professors, about 1,000 volumes a year] of historical collections of older books, he added.

In contrast, last year’s budget for BKSN Library’s Punjabi department was miniscule Rs 6,250.

Furthermore, PUP’s monthly salary bill is around Rs 29 crore. Its monthly grant from the state government is Rs 9.5 crore, or Rs 114 crore per year, while the varsity’s annual budget is Rs 470 crore.

Whereas, Amitai told this reporter that it was no secret that 70 percent of the budgets of research universities in Israel comes from the government. The remaining 30 percent or so comes from various sources. Whereas, state educational institutions in India such as PUP, do not even get 30 percent of their budget from the government.

“The state controls the university,” Arvind said. “They [government] appoint the vice chancellors and call it ‘our’ university, and then give it grants [worth] only one-fourth of [its] budget. Then why even call it a state university?”
Locating the epicentre

Arvind believes that the troubles began in the 1990s, with then finance minister Manmohan Singh drafting policies to cut down expenditure on higher education. “Universities across the country started suffering badly,” he said. There were cuts on grants, he said, adding that the educational institutions were asked to fend for themselves, mostly by raising fees.

Could policies prepared at the heart of Delhi affect the lungs of educational institutions in the states? Economist and former dean of the varsity, Professor Sucha Singh Gill, who oversaw PUP’s financial matters for more than three decades, said it could.

“Not directly, but implicitly of course,” he said. These policies at the centre damaged universities across the country, he added. “All around the country a thought was delivered that we have to downsize the government.”

In 1991-1992, the government of Punjab's contribution to the university’s total expenditure was 88.63 percent, the highest ever as per available data. That year, the fees paid by students made up 9.05 percent of PUP’s total income – the lowest as per data accessed by this reporter.

Within the next two years, the state government’s grant was reduced to 72.52 percent. This cut directly impacted the students. The gap was filled by emptying students’ pockets. They now had to pay 17.08 percent of the varsity’s total income.

Over the years, this trend continued. The government kept spending less and less on education, the students more and more. ​​In 2014, student fees comprised 64.13 percent of the varsity’s total income, the most in its recorded history.

In this war of who pays more, students or the government, the former paid 49.54 percent of the varsity’s income in the last academic year. They defeated the government by huge margins.

Gill said that the crisis, however, first surfaced during the Shiromani Akali Dal and the Bharatiya Janata Party government in 1997-2002. “That time, the government and the bureaucracy decided that each year, 10 percent of the government’s grants to the university shall be cut, so that within 10 years the university will become self-sustaining,” he said. This self-sustenance would mean “that no funding will be required from the government,” he added.

“Not only this, but the then sitting finance secretary of the state and succeeding finance secretary in Congress rule, [before SAD and BJP came to power in 1997], were sent to the US to get their orientation [to implement funds cut]. Ordinarily, junior officers are sent for orientations. But this time, the government sent these senior officers. Afterwards, they managed the roadshow to cut the grants. The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the central government were operating via bureaucracy. The political leaders [of SAD and BJP] at the state were following their advice,” alleged Gill.

In 2002, Swaran Singh Boparai, the then vice chancellor of PUP asked the newly formed Congress government to stop the 10 percent funds cut each year, Gill said. But a 50 percent cut already implemented during the last [of the SAD and BJP] government, was never revoked.

During the early years of the last decade, again during the SAD and BJP government, two things happened. About 2,000 non-teaching and around 100 teaching faculties were recruited, even as the government’s grant to the varsity was reduced. An increased burden on the varsity pushed it to take loans from the banks. Then, it opened four engineering colleges and an escrow account, in a belief that fees collected from the students would, like the fable of the goose and the golden egg, settle the varsity’s bills. But, as it turned out, the goose hardly laid eggs.

Promise yet again

On November 24, 2021 the government announced an annual grant of Rs 240 crore to the university. The chief minister of Punjab, Charanjit Singh Channi, also said that the government would “take over” the varsity’s financial liabilities, including the 150 crore loan.

Arvind explained: “To begin with, I asked the government to increase the monthly grant from Rs 9.5 crore to Rs 20 crore, which is roughly half my budget. In addition to that, I demanded help to get rid of the Rs 150 crore loan which is hanging over the head of the university.”

He said he told the government to give him 50 percent, and the rest he would generate, or control the expenditure. He also said that he would somehow also generate Rs 100 crore for pending liabilities.

He asked, “Where does the government expect me to generate more funds? By increasing fees? If I do that, then it will be like a very expensive private university, which is against its character. If 70 percent of the total budget actually comes from students as tuition fees, what else do you mean by private then?”

As a promise to revive the university, the chief minister agreed to these two demands and made the decision public in November last year. Two months later, as Punjab begins its assembly election, the wheels to actualise the promise have hardly hit the ground.

But Arvind is hopeful. Because the announcement is in public domain, he believes the chief minister will keep his promise. He is cautious though. Because “there is always a slip between cup and lip”, as Arvind said, he is not counting the chicken before it is hatched.

“The government has advertised it [the promise]. It has gone around saying everywhere that ‘we have saved the university and it is us who have done this’! There were full-page advertisements in the newspapers,” said Arvind.

He added, “The government has taken a lot of political mileage out of it, but if they do not implement it, at the earliest, they will actually lose all the credits they have gained. If they want to cash it, they better go the whole hog.”

As this reporter left Punjabi University’s library, he was stopped by a security guard who asked to search his bag in case he had stolen a book.

This reporter gently replied, was there even a book at the library to steal?

The reporter would like to thank Kamlesh Goyal for his assistance with this story.