New Delhi: For the first time ever the Union Government has officially pitched for deployment of paramilitary forces in its educational institution. The Human Resource Development (HRD) Ministry has approached the Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) and sought to deploy permanently a contingent on the Visva-Bharati University campus in Santiniketan.
Presently, there is no other central university which has paramilitary forces or even police personnel deployed permanently on campus.
Visva-Bharati University is a public central university located in Santiniketan, West Bengal, India. It was founded by Rabindranath Tagore who called it Visva-Bharati, which means the communion of the world with India. Until independence it was a college. Soon after independence, in 1951, the institution was given the status of a university and was renamed Visva-Bharati University.
It is learned that HRD Ministry have written to Rajesh Ranjan, CISF Director General last month where it has stated that the cost of deployment will be borne by the University out of the grants it receives from the government.
According to reports, the Ministry’s letter has been written on the command of Visva-Bharati vice-chancellor Bidyut Chakrabarty. Chakrabarty has said that private security personnel currently employed by the university owe their commitment to the “TMC local bosses” and, hence, “disobey” Visva-Bharati’s security officer “with impunity”.
The V-C accused the security guards for being “silent onlookers” when the students held a sit-in protest in May this year against the increase in the price of application forms. He said that the guards created an atmosphere to enable protests for the students.
In its letter to the CISF, it has also argued that Visva-Bharati is not a closed campus and there have been incidents of chain-snatching and that private security guards on campus have failed to do their duty.
