Grants for scholars: UGC plans tie-up with banks

CHANDIGARH: To speed up the process of disbursement of monthly scholarship to research scholars in various universities, the University Grants Commission (UGC) is exploring the possibility of tying up with various banks for release of the amount.
Disclosing this, additional secretary of UGC Dr R K Chauhan told the Times News Network said that the new initiative may take care of the bottlenecks in the system, where research scholars entitled to receive the grants have to wait for months together for their scholarships and fellowships.
Dr Chauhan had come to the city to take part in the meeting of the vice-chancellors and representatives of North Zone universities, which was held at Panjab Universities on Saturday.
Dr Chauhan said, "In the present system, the grant money is disbursed to the concerned university first and then allocated to the different research scholars. Since the UGC does not know all the research scholars working in various research projects in all universities, we are not individually releasing the money but make a collective payment. However, the UGC is trying to enter into a tie-up with banks to make the payments of fellowships to the research scholars."
The additional secretary, however, said that the decision on a particular bank is yet to be taken but talks were going on.
Peeved by the consistent non-release of grants, the Registrar of the Guru Nanak Dev Indraprastha University, Delhi mooted the idea of giving post-dated cheques to the research scholars but the UGC officials expressed their inability to do so.
The problem becomes more complicated as the universities do not have enough money to fund the scholars while the UGC grants sometimes remain in pipeline.
Moreover in universities like Panjab University which follow the pre-auditing system, the audit does not allow payment without the actual availability of funds and the financial position of the university is not good enough to pay the salary to the candidates from their own resources.