O.U. TO HOLD ON TO RARE COURSES
There are few takers for some post-graduate courses and PG diploma courses being offered at Osmania University. In some cases, the number of applicants was so small that no entrance test was conducted for Kannada, Marathi, Persian, applied linguistics, functional Hindi and translation.
Officials said this was because few candidates met the eligibility criteria, and not many were aware of these courses.
The university offers six post-gradute courses and postgraduate diploma courses in which a total of 53 candidates enrolled this year. Officials said the classes would be conducted for these courses irrespective of the number of students.
OU registrar Gopal Reddy said, “These are rare courses and it is difficult to find eligible candidates such as a graduate in Marathi or Kannada. Even for Urdu we have fewer students as most of the eligible candidates prefer other universities to continue Urdu language studies.”
He said Telugu studies has lot of demand; 4,190 candidates registered, 3,393 appeared for the exam and 3,384 qualified.
He said, “Depending on the enrolment and eligibilty, admissions will be given to candidates and rest of the seats will be vacant.”
Professor D. Ashok of the OU Directorate of Admissions said, “It was the same last year as well as less than 20 candidates enrolled for the rare courses; we did not conduct the the entrance test in 2016 as well.”
Prof. Battu Satyanaryana of the Osmania University Teachers' Association said, “Along with few takers, there is also a staff crunch in the departments dealing with these subjects. For Persian we have one teacher and three for applied linguistics. We are struggling to run courses like geophysics and geochemistry which have a lot of demand due to staff crunch.”
He said the university was continuing to run the courses despite lack of general interest and a staff cruchh in order to preserve the culture of certain departments and languages. “When teachers are not available for a few subjects there is no chance of re-deployment as there are no teachers to deploy. For Urdu department we have only three permanent teachers and only around 15 students are enrolled for the course”.
In the post-graduate courses, 11 students have enrolled for Kannada, two for Marathi and 18 for Persian. For PG diploma courses, there are seven students in applied linguists, 14 in functional Hindu and translation and one in Urdu palaeography.