Students Grievance Redress Centre opened in MU

CHENNAI:  In a bid to dispose of complaints from students in a time-bound and quick manner, Madras University, the country’s oldest, opened its first Students Grievance Redress Centre on Friday for students of its affiliate colleges. If all goes well with this idea, the sight of queues of students waiting to get their issues sorted would soon be a thing of the past. Vice Chancellor of the University Col G Thiruvasagam said that one of the issues that the institution was facing was the inordinate delay in attending to grievances of students, especially those related to the retrieval of records.Given the fact that the University was more than 150 years old, retrieving documents from the huge file collection was a difficult task and the complaints usually went unattended as officials in the various sections remained busy with day-to-day work. Therefore, the VC said that the grievance centre would create a database of complaints that would be attended to serially. A maximum of 15 days would be given to the concerned department to analyse the complaint and either provide a solution or at least a reply to the student concerned for further action.He said that along with the acknowledgement of the complaint, a tracking ID with individual username and password would be given to the students for following up their complaints.The VC said that this system would be most beneficial to the research scholars who had already submitted their thesis and waiting for the degree. He said that there were cases where the doctorate degree remained unawarded even two years after submission of thesis owing to some minor issues such as non-appointment of panel of examiners. The students, through the redressal centre, can know the status of their thesis and also the reason for the delay in examination, he said.