Delhi Education minister Atishi on Friday wrote a letter to Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan alleging irregularities in 12 Delhi University (DU) colleges funded by the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) government.

In her letter to Pradhan, the minister wrote, “I would like to bring to your kind notice the issues related to the governance of 12 colleges affiliated with the DU. These colleges are governed under DU ordinance XVIII that lays down the framework for colleges other than those maintained by the Government of India. These colleges are funded by the Delhi Government i.e not maintained by the Government of India.”

She said that in the last few years, the Delhi government’s Directorate of Audit noted several serious “irregularities and procedural lapses” involving hundreds of crores from the public exchequer.

Some examples of these irregularities are as follows:

“Colleges have created posts and engaged teaching and non teaching staff without the approval of their administrative department and Finance Department of Government of Delhi. Salaries worth several crores are being paid who were never appointed through the established procedures,” Atishi wrote in her letter highlighting the alleged irregularities.

Among others, she claimed despite having crores of funds lying in their corpus, many of these colleges have not taken any initiative to pay the salaries or other dues of their staff, in a timely manner.

“In my view these are symptoms of a larger malice that plague these colleges. Though these colleges are affiliated with DU, they are not answerable to it for judicious utilisation of their grants. On the other hand, they also do not feel answerable towards the Directorate of Higher Education of Delhi Government of, which is their administrative department, because they are affiliated to DU,” she said.

Atishi has proposed two propositions to the Union minister to overcome these constraints.

In the first proposal, she has suggested that the Government of India may direct the DU to de-affiliate these 12 colleges. Subsequent to that, the Delhi government will designate them as the campus of ‘Ambedkar University’ or ‘Delhi Skills and Entrepreneurship University’. The Delhi government will thereafter provide full funding to these institutions.

In her second proposition, Atishi said the Centre may take full control of these 12 colleges under the DU and added that in that case the Delhi government  will stop allocating funds to these colleges.