NEW DELHI: Facing flak in the last few days, more trouble seems to be in store for UGC chairman S K Thorat with the Central Vigilance Commission registering a complaint against him on a series of allegations ranging from his involvement in pushing through Rs 224 crore e-governance project, corruption in grant of deemed university status and misusing UGC’s resources to run his own institute Indian Institute of Dalit Studies.
CVC had on March 31 asked HRD ministry to investigate and submit a report on the issue within three months. Asked about the complaint, Thorat confirmed it and said it pertained to the four issues to which the ministry must have replied to the CVC. However, the complainant, Raju Sharma, former secretary of UGC, who was unceremoniously removed from the commission, said he was yet to receive any communication from the CVC.
Meanwhile, UGC has been asked to review the infrastructure, academic quality and other parameters of deemed universities that came up in the past five years.
Though Thorat claims that there is no basis to the allegations, sources said the e-governance project — that was put on hold at the last minute due to media reports — still incurred an expenditure of a few crores in hiring consultants and other things.
As reported by TOI last month, CVC had in January severely indicted UGC for flouting all norms and not being transparent in the e-governance project, which entailed networking of institutions of higher learning. CVC had asked UGC that the “process needs to be reviewed and made more professional and transparent in order to avoid complications later”. It had said, “The total value of the project may not have been correctly estimated and may be on the higher side.”
CVC had suggested that the project “can be managed better” by starting on a smaller scale and expanded later. It had gone to the extent of saying that it did not “ordinarily interfere in the tendering process”, but added that “it may not be prudent for the UGC to go ahead with the project in its present form”.
Though UGC had denied CVC’s contention about specific omissions and discrepancies, CVC had said there was no justification in extending the last date for submitting proposals when 19 of them had already come by the last date.
CVC had also said extension of the closing date was not advertised in newspapers and only put on UGC’s website. UGC had justified it on the ground that this had helped since the number of proposals had gone up to 26. UGC also said it was due to lack of time that extension was notified only on the website.
CVC also said that two of the seven broad parameters on the basis of which five out of 26 proposals were shortlisted were not found in the notice inviting the tender. UGC, however, justified the move on the ground that it was done by the expert committee and applied uniformly to all 26 bidders.