From Our Correspondent
CALCUTTA : West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee kept his promise on March 19 as the state Assembly passed the Presidency University Bill, 2009 with ruthless severity, leaving the hapless Opposition with no alternative but to boycott the post-lunch proceedings of the house.

The Bill was moved by the Higher Education Minister Sudarshan Roy Choudhury at 2 pm and was immediately put to vote by the Speaker Mr Hasim Abdul Halim. Seeing the government's firm resolve the Opposition comprising Trinamul Congress and the Congress walked out of the house.  

The Left Front has 232 MLAs in a House of 294. Trinamul Congress and the Congress have a combined strength of 57 -- a number that couldn't have possibly blocked the Bill. The Bill will now go to the state Governor M K Narayanan for approval.

Opposition Congress and Trinamool Congress legislators have urged the Governor not to give his assent to the Bill, 2009, which, they alleged, had provision intended to make the institution "another stronghold of CPI-M".

Speaking on the Bill, Sudarshan Roy Chowdhury said that the academicians as well as the people were for granting university status to the 193-year-old institution with a rich heritage.

The government’s firm resolve to get the bill through was obvious from the fact that the party had issued a whip a day earlier asking every MLA in the city to be present in the Assembly during the debate. “It has been done to ensure the passage of the bill. Some of our MLAs are presently attending the CITU national conference in Chandigarh, and we don’t want to take a chance,” said a CPM legislator from North 24-Parganas yesterday.

"The Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee has made a promise and we have to stand by it," said another MLA who refused to be identified.

Meanwhile the CPM-backed Government College Teachers’ Association had announced on March 18 that nearly 1,300 teachers of 36 government-run colleges, including Presidency College, would cease work on March 19 to protest the planned passage of the bill in its present form.

This is the first time in the 193-year history of Presidency that a section of teachers of the institution will be boycotting classes to join a protest. Sources said they would march to the Assembly to submit a memorandum to the Speaker seeking the status of an affiliating university for Presidency rather than a unitary one.

The Bill seeks to convert Calcutta's prestigious Presidency College, alma matar to Bengal's who's who, into a full-fledged unitary university by June this year so that it could start admissions in July.

The Bill, earlier referred to a 9-member Standing Committee of the West Bengal Assembly, was tabled by the committee in the House on March 16, paving the way for a speedy conversion of Presidency College into a unitary, autonomous university.

The proposed Presidency University needs to come into being by June for first-year BA and B.Sc admissions to be opened for the 2010-11 academic session. Undergraduate academic sessions in Bengal, including those under Calcutta and Jadavpur universities, begin in July every year.

The government, therefore, has less than three months to complete the remaining formalities like initiating a debate on the bill in the House, seeing it through, issuing a gazette notification and then implementing it.

The nine-member Standing Committee on Higher Education, comprising representatives of the ruling Left Front as well as the Opposition, made minor changes to the draft bill and made a couple of recommendations before tabling it in the Assembly.

Backgrounder

The Presidency University Bill, 2009 was introduced in the Assembly by Higher Education Minister Sudarshan Roy Chowdhury on December 15 last year and was referred to the Standing Committee.

Earlier the governing body of Presidency College had at its meeting on November 3 unanimously resolved that in the present higher education scenario, the institution should be upgraded to a unitary university.

The bill said that it has been found to be expedient to confer the status of university on the government college with a rich heritage to enable it to function more efficiently as a teaching, training and research centre in various branches of learning.

The Bill mentions that once Presidency College turns into a university it would have to expand its campus. The state government is likely to allot land in and around Kolkata.