Many ‘ancient’ PU courses have not received a student for years

To name a few,these include Ratna,Bhushan,Budhiman,Giani,Vidwan,Adib,Munshi,Maulvi,Maulvi Alim,Maulvi Fazil and many more. These are one-year Diploma or Certificate courses.

Head of the Department of Urdu Dr Madhukar Arya said that these were introduced when PU was known as Oriental College of Lahore and the education pattern and curriculum were entirely different from what they are today. Today,there is hardly any relevance of these courses and,thus,no takers.

Surprisingly,even many of the faculty members and non-teaching staff have hardly heard that these courses are being offered by their own University. And those who have,claim these to be a burden on the University as they rarely generate any revenue but result in burgeoning expenditure,if by any chance,there is even one student enrolled in any of these courses.

“If there is even a single student,we have to undertake the entire procedure that is followed for 50 students. The university has to complete the course,conduct the examinations,evaluate the answer sheets and then declare the result,” pointed out a senior administrative official.

“These are some of the ancient courses running from the time when these were in demand and there were takers for it. The fact cannot be denied that today there are hardly many takers for such courses but taking this plea we cannot scrap them,” noted Registrar A K Bhandari.

There have been proposals for scrapping of these courses but this could not be implemented due to opposition from certain departments. Unfortunately,when the University failed to withdraw these courses from its list,it could hardly propose any plans to either revive these courses or adapt them according to demands from candidates and industry.

There are courses like Certificate Course in Disaster Management,Certificate course in Guru Granth Acharya,Certificate Course in Functional Punjabi and Hindi where there have been no takers. All these course are offered separately by different departments of the University.