IGNTU branch in Manipur gets formal approval
Following is excerpted from a report in Telegraph.
The Centre has approved a request by the Manipur government to set up a campus of the new Indira Gandhi National Tribal University in the state and asked the chief minister to allocate land for it.
The human resource development ministry has authorised the IGNTU, India’s first university dedicated to tribal studies, to open a campus in the hills of Manipur, The Telegraph has learnt.
… Manipur, sources said, was told of the approval just before the announcement of elections. But the formal sanction from the IGNTU governing body — critical for setting up a new campus — came only earlier this week.
The IGNTU was started last year at Amarkantak in Madhya Pradesh but its planned campus there is tangled in controversy with forest officials and some religious leaders opposed to chopping of trees to build the university.
Manipur is the first state whose request for an IGNTU campus has been accepted. Several other states with a significant tribal population had also asked for a campus.
The Congress rules both at the Centre and in Manipur.
With the Centre’s approval, the state may now actually develop the first fully operational campus of the IGNTU unless the dispute over Amarkantak is resolved, sources said. The headquarters of the IGNTU will however remain in MP, the sources said.
The government, through the IGNTU vice-chancellor, has written to chief minister Okram Ibobi Singh asking him to allocate 300 acres of land in the state for the campus, officials said. The state government is likely to offer land for the campus in Senapati, it is learnt.
…The tribal university is expected to offer, in the coming years, the country’s best academic opportunities in tribal literature, culture, language, music, arts and scriptures.
The idea behind the university is to provide students from a tribal background an education that they can identify with and which can train them in helping safeguard and develop their culture.
Classes in select subjects started last year from a temporary campus at Amarkantak.
March 20th, 2009