Former VU V-C ‘misappropriated’ UGC funds

9 August 2012

biswabrata goswami
MIDNAPORE, 9 AUG: A former Vice-Chancellor of Vidyasagar University has been accused of misappropriating University Grants Commission funds to pay for his trip to a five-day conference in Beijing in 2004.
The deputy secretary of the University Grants Commission, Mrs Archana Thakur, has written a letter to the registrar of Vidyasagar University, asking him to explain the misappropriation of funds, and to refund Rs 60,976 to the commission.
In her letter, Mrs Thakur has written that the university disbursed Rs 60,976 to Prof. Swapam Kumar Pramanik, the then Vice-Chancellor of the university, for his trip to the 36th World Congress of Sociology, which was held 7-11 July 2004. This was a violation of the commission's guidelines, she wrote. 
This has been revealed according to the complaint lodged with the commission by Mr Avijit Guha, a reader of in the department of Anthropology at the university. Mr Guha, who first raised questions about the practices of Prof. Pramanik, got his information through RTI applications.  
For his Beijing tour, Prof. Pramanik not only used the unassigned University Grants Commission funding, to which he was not entitled, but also flouted the norms for taking advances from public institutions.
Normally, an applicant is given an advance of 50 to 75 per cent of the total amount, according to an official note from the university finance officer dated 8 March 2010. But Prof. Pramanik secured an advance of Rs 75,000 from the university and spent Rs 60,976.  Moreover, Vidyasagar University's unassigned grant committee met on 6 May 2004, with Prof. Pramanik himself acting as chairman, and sanctioned the financial assistance to Prof. Pramanik, which is also an unusual state of affairs, as Vice-Chancellors are suppose to apply to the secretary University Grants Commission. After reviewing the whole matter, Mrs Thakur wrote: "It appears that misappropriation of an amount of Rs 60,976 perhaps escaped the attention while settling the accounts."
Also, according to Mr Guha, Prof. Pramanik attended the conference based on an 11 November 2003 invitation from a professor at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences “addressing him as V-C of VU”. Prof. Pramanik took charge as Vice-Chancellor (V-C) of Vidyasagar University (VU) on 1 December 2003.