Karnataka halves university development funds in two years

Bengaluru: The development funds released by the state govt for universities has been reduced by half in just two years.As per the department of higher education, Rs 41 crore was released as grants for the development of universities in 2023-24. However, in 2024-25, this was reduced to Rs 30 crore, before falling further to Rs 20 crore in 2025-26.Karnataka has 32 public universities. The higher education department said that universities are autonomous institutions and need to raise resources internally.Higher education minister MC Sudhakar, during the ongoing legislature session, said: "Money collected from internal resources should be used as development funds. Currently, more than 50% of internal resources are spent on guest lecturers, outsourced staff, and temporary teaching and non-teaching posts. This is beyond the accepted limits. Instead, the university should spend more on development. The university has to meet expenses from internal resources."While staff salaries are covered by the govt, universities are bound to find the money to pay guest faculty and outsourced employees. Currently, there are requests to fund the salaries of the outsourced employees as well, the minister pointed out.Many universities said they have not been getting any development funds in the past few years. "Most of the universities, including us, rely on affiliation fees from colleges, exam and tuition fees, and research funding from various sources," said the vice-chancellor of a university.It may be recalled that when a few universities were unable to fund pension disbursal, the govt had to release some money recently to cover the shortage.