Jadavpur University has decided to “accept moral responsibility” for the loss of scholarships that students may have suffered owing to a delay in the publication of semester results and will raise funds “to compensate for the loss of such scholarships/fellowships”.

The decision was taken at a meeting between the university authorities and the students’ union of the engineering and technology faculty on Saturday night, following unrest on the campus over flaws in results and delay in their publication.

The resolution of the meeting says: “Jadavpur University accepts moral responsibility for the loss of scholarship/ fellowship which may have been suffered by the students as a result of delay in the publication of results. JU will seek financial support from the extended members of JU community... to compensate for the loss of such scholarships/ fellowship”.

A JU official said underprivileged students were offered a number of scholarships by the state government.

“To renew a scholarship a student has to upload marksheets of the two previous semesters and parents’ income certificates on a portal by the end of a year. Since the results of the odd semester exams that ended on December 22, 2019, were published this November and the grade cards were full of errors, students missed out on scholarships,” the official said.

What were the errors? 

“Two results with separate scores have been issued to one student. There are instances of one student having been issued another’s result. Marks have been erroneously entered. Delayed publication of flawed results led to a situation wherein students could not upload the results to be able to renew scholarships,” said Aritra Majumder, the chairperson of the students’ union in the engineering faculty. “JU has many students who depend on scholarships to pay tuition fees, hostel fees and exam-related charges.”

Vice-chancellor Suranjan Das said he appealed to the state government on Monday to keep the portals for receiving scholarship applications active beyond December 31. The government, he said, accepted his request.

The revised results will be published by January 20.