10 new colleges for Pune

“I have approved 131 new traditional colleges,100 professional colleges offering courses like BBA,BCA or BFT and all proposals for new divisions and streams,” he told The Indian Express on Friday.

This year,9,14,802 students had cleared the HSC exams. “There was a deficit of some seats for accommodating these students in the colleges offering degree courses. Therefore,there was a need to increase the seats. We had set up a task force to look into the proposals and,accordingly,cleared them,” the minister said.

However,questions are raised over the delay in approvals as the existing colleges have already started their academic year a month ago.

According to sources,the proposals were pending for a long-time. “The state government took time to clear the proposals as it wanted to do the balancing act by approving most of the proposals of educational institutes of MLAs of ruling parties,” one of them said.

Tope admitted that some proposals were from MLAs of ruling parties. However,he said all the genuine proposals were cleared. “There was no discretion or special treatment. As I said,I have cleared all the proposals for starting new divisions and streams. We could not clear all the proposals for new colleges,but it was decided by the task force.”