Proposals for colleges, courses flood Shivaji University Kolhapur

KOLHAPUR: The Shivaji University, Kolhapur's (SUK) five-year master plan meeting held recently received more than 50 proposals for new colleges and courses in Kolhapur division.
The registrar at SUK, Vilas Nandavedekar told TOI, "We have received an ample number of college proposals and the data of these proposals is yet to be analysed."
Former director of SUK D R More said, "We want to introduce new employable courses and we have asked the educational institutions to submit the proposals accordingly."
"There are ample arts, science and commerce colleges across the three districts.We need to have more skill training oriented courses in the region. The region is known for its sugar production but we have only one institute that offers a sugar technology course.," he said.
"It is still a mystery why others do not come forward to make sure that we have more institutes that offer these courses," he added.
"Besides the region known for its sugar production, there is an ample scope for leather technology as well. We have been asked to reconsider the proposals we have received. We will try and find our opportunities and freedom of introducing new courses from these proposals by Friday," he added.
While explaining the focus of the next five-year master plan More said,"We will scrutinies these proposals and then it will be approved first in the management council and later in the senate meeting. Only when the proposals will pass from both the boards, we will forward it for further reconciliation to the state government."
An SUK official said, "The proposals will be discussed in the meeting. We will be taking action according to the academic development plan for the next five years. This will be the basis to either accept a proposal or reject it."
"During the recent meetings, issues such as faculty shortage, additional divisions and geographical requirements of the academics were discussed thoroughly and it received a good response from the stakeholders as well. Job generation for students and creation of skill based courses was one of the other major topics of the master plan meeting," he added.
It has to be noted in the past two years, SUK has seen a rise in demand of conventional courses such as Arts, Commerce and Science resulting in huge admission crisis for students across the district.
According to the official, the SUK has to submit its five-year master plan for the academic year 2017-18 to 2020-21 and it has invited all the stakeholders for the meetings in their respective districts.