Opinion In Patna University appointments, a welcome experiment

Patna University’s appointment of five college principals through a lottery, supervised by a Raj Bhawan panel and conducted under videographic surveillance, is a welcome departure from established procedure. On the surface, it appears at odds with the gravity of higher education frameworks and their structures of evaluation. But it is also a well-deserved indictment of the status quo, and it could become an act of institutional truth-telling — in a system corroded by nepotism, caste and political patronage, randomisation may be an impartial arbiter.

All criticism of the procedure, though, may not be without merit. Assigning a home science professor to head a science college, for instance, could raise legitimate concerns about subject expertise and institutional fit. Leadership in academia demands vision, domain knowledge, and the capacity to foster intellectual growth — qualities not easily left to chance. BSP leader Mayawati has decried the lottery as a “distorted experiment”; others have echoed the discomfort. But this indignation obscures a larger reality. For decades, government appointments in Bihar, including in its university system, have been hostage to cronyism, and its administration treated as an extension of the political machinery. Last month, Bihar’s LoP Tejashwi Prasad Yadav accused the ruling NDA government of “blatant favouritism”, questioning government appointments. In 2015, the Patna High Court quashed the appointment of 12 college principals under Magadh University for procedural irregularities. In 2017, an FIR was filed against JD(U) leader Mewalal Choudhary for manipulating faculty recruitments as vice-chancellor of Bihar Agriculture University in Bhagalpur between 2010 and 2015. As reported in this newspaper, shortlisted candidates in Bihar State University Service Commission this year include several well-connected individuals. The decision to conduct a lottery could mean a radical reset, disrupting entrenched power networks and infusing a form of neutrality into a deeply flawed system.

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Higher education in Bihar, however, needs more. The lottery should be viewed as a short-term experiment, not a long-term prescription. Focus on transparent, specialised selection panels, independent oversight bodies, public appointment records and rotational leadership — many colleges have been under interim principals for almost 15 years in the absence of timely appointments — must bolster the roadmap for the future. By acknowledging that fairness must be deliberately engineered, Bihar has taken a difficult but necessary first step. It must convert this unconventional gambit into the groundwork for governance.