NIEIT urges UGs
Source: The Sangai Express
Imphal, July 16 2014:
Staff of National Institute of Electronics and Information Technology, (NIEIT), Imphal Centre, formerly known as DOEACC, today staged a sit-in-protest at its Akampat campus urging to revoke the monetary demands served by different armed groups.
According to a senior staff, two different factions of URF, PREPAK and KYKL have been constantly asking the authority of the institute to comply with their unbearable monetary demands.
He said that Delhi Head Office of NIEIT used to earmark separate budget for Imphal Centre in their budget around four years back.
However, the Head Office had asked the Imphal Centre to run the institute on its own, he said and added that no additional fund with exception for infrastructural development and maintenance amount is provided by the Head Office now.
Fees collected from students is the only source of income for the institute, he said and added that the institute does not however charge any fee to ST and SC students.
The institute is being run with a loan of Rs 2 crore from the Head Office, out of which, only around Rs 8 lakh has been paid back, the senior staff said.
He said that the financial position of the institute is so weak that employees' salary for June month is yet to be cleared.
The condition has become so critical that the institute would find hard to run in the State if UG groups keep on serving monetary demands, he added.
Moreover, the senior staff said, no student from other States has turned up for any course of the institute now due to bad law and order condition.
Saying that Imphal Centre is the first centre of the entire North East and fifth centre of the whole country, the senior staff expressed worry that the institute might shut down if such demands are served regularly.
In case of closure of the institute, regular staff might be shifted to other centres, lives of contract staff would be miserable as they would become unemployed, he added.