‘Distance education’ engg degrees cancelled

NEW DELHI: Clamping down on three deemed-to-be universities granting engineering degrees through distance education mode, the Supreme Court on Friday cancelled all engineering degrees awarded by these universities since 2001 and ordered a Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) probe into the roles of the University Grants Commission (UGC) and other authorities for giving approval to these courses.

The three universities — JRN Rajasthan Vidhyapeeth University, Udaipur; Vinayaka Mission Research Foundation, Salem, Tamil Nadu; IASE Deemed University, Rajasthan — have been conducting distance education programmes without taking prior approval from any of the authorities, including the UGC or the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE).

The verdict comes on a bunch of petition wherein questions regarding the validity of degrees in engineering awarded by the concerned deemed-to-be universities were under scrutiny.

The court also directed the UGC to look into the deemedto-be university status enjoyed by the concerned institutions and conduct an inquiry in that behalf.

Lamenting the state of affairs in such universities, the bench also restrained “all deemedto-be universities to carry on any courses in distance education mode from the academic session 2018-2019 onwards unless and until it is permissible to conduct such courses in distance education mode and specific permissions are granted by the concerned statutory/regulatory authorities in respect of each of those courses and unless the offcampus centres/study centres are individually inspected and found adequate by the concerned statutory authorities”.