Tripura will get five new colleges including three government degree colleges and two private colleges this month, said Tripura education minister Ratan Lal Nath on Friday.
Speaking to reporters at the state secretariat, the education minister said since the BJP-IPFT government came to power in 2018, several innovative decisions were adopted to develop the quality of education. One of these decisions was to set up colleges in Public Private Partnership (PPP) model and accordingly, tenders were floated in October 2020, inviting renowned educational firms who are willing to be private partners to come and invest in Tripura.
“We have got two colleges being set up at Jirania and Kakraban in PPP model. The first one is a law college and the second is a degree college. We shall have 33 percent reservation for free admissions from the government in both”, the minister said.
He added that three other general degree colleges are being set up with government initiative at Old Agartala Rural Development (RD) block and an English Medium college at West Tripura and a general degree college in Panisagar in North Tripura.
These are in addition to 22 government degree colleges of the state, a law college, a government-run art and craft college, a music college, a state university, two medical colleges, one engineering college already managed and operated by the state government here.
Tripura also has a central university, a central forensic university, an NIT, several other private colleges and a private university.
Prior to coming in power in 2018, BJP promised in its Vision Document that it would set up one college in each of its 60 assembly constituencies.
Referring the issue, education minister Nath today said the new colleges are being set up to facilitate greater spread of higher education, reduce pressure on colleges in Agartala and ensure that no potential student stayed out of the ambit of higher education.
The new colleges are being set up in renovated old buildings of schools and higher educational infrastructure.
The government is planning on transferring existing faculty members, recruiting new college teachers, promoting Post Graduate Teachers (PGT) serving as college faculty members to assistant professors, provided they have necessary qualifications among other decisions.
For starters, these new colleges would be started with integrated courses for law and commerce disciplines for the law college while subjects from the humanities disciplines like Bengali, English, Political science, history, Education, Sanskrit, economics and sociology would be offered in the degree colleges.
On a different note, the minister said his government ensured parity in salaries given to non-teaching employees of the Sarva Siksha Abhiyan without reducing their pay. The concerned employees would now have Rs. 4,000-5,000 salary hike on average as part of the move to introduce parity.
The government would also be recruiting 668 Block Resource Persons (BRP) and Cluster Resource Persons (CRP) on a contractual basis to boost educational infrastructure in the grass root level.