New university in Tripura to start functioning from August

Following the governor's assent to a bill to set up a new university in Tripura, the institution will start functioning in August, a minister said here on Tuesday.

"The new state university will start functioning from August. Kolkata's Jadavpur University Professor Gautam Bose has been selected as the vice chancellor of the new university," Tripura's education minister Tapan Chakraborty told reporters.

The state assembly last year passed the bill to set up a new state university to expand higher education in the state which has attained a literacy rate of 96.82 percent

Tripura now claims the highest literacy rate in India, beating Kerala at 93.91 percent.

The state currently has a central university as well as a private university.

The new state government-run university would be named after erstwhile Tripura king Maharaja Birbikram Kishore Manikya Bahadur (1923-1947), who had set up the state's first degree college here in 1947.

The new university would attract students not only from Tripura and other north-eastern states, but also Bangladesh, said Chakraborty.

Set up in 1987, the existing Tripura University was turned into a central institution in 2007. It has been ranked fourth in eastern India and 43rd in the country in a recent survey conducted by private study groups.

The new university would ease pressure on Tripura (central) University and help boost excellence in higher education, the minister said.

Tripura presently has 22 degree colleges, two medical colleges, and 15 other professional and technical colleges with total annual enrolment of about 18,000 students.

Chakraborty said that after Tripura attained 87.75 percent literacy in the 2011 census, the state government undertook a mass literacy campaign mostly for the unlettered adult people.

The final evaluation of the neo-literate people was conducted across the state in August 2013 under the supervision of the Kolkata-based Indian Statistical Institution and Noida-based National Institute of Open Schooling.