With funds coming, regional varsity to spread wings

The South Asian University (SAU) has started receiving funds from the member countries of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), a step that will help the varsity to bounce back from its financial crisis, SAU president KK Aggarwal said.

In an interview with PTI, Aggarwal said that the university, under his tenure, will focus on controlling the expenditure by attracting more students without scholarships and designing a rational salary structure for teachers.

“The university is supposed to be funded by all the member countries. Others were not paying their share for quite some time. I have spoken to all of them and by and large, their response is that now that things have started improving we are ready to pay,” Aggarwal said.

“We have recently moved to a new permanent campus. Previously, we were functioning from a rented space. So our first focus is to build the required infrastructure such as hostels for students and academic blocks for the new programmes that are in the pipeline to be rolled out starting this academic year,” Aggarwal said.

“We will also look into opening offshore campuses of SAU in each of the SAARC countries using the funds and setting up its branches across India,” he added.

Earlier in 2022, Indian External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar had said that some of the SAARC countries had not paid their share of the financial aid to the university due to which the varsity was facing severe financial constraints.

“Beyond that, there are issues of management and academic freedom,” Jaishanker had said while responding to a question in the parliament.

The top three posts of the university were served by ad-hoc members since 2019, during which it suffered a loss of about Rs 9m due to an erroneous tax exemption granted to the registrar, according to a Public Accounts Committee report tabled in the Lok Sabha in December last year.