DEGREES OF PARALYSIS

Tamil Nadu's higher education stays stuck in a limbo while the state-governor legal turf battle drags on

- By Kavitha Muralidharan

ON THE SPRAWLING campus of the University of Madras (UnoM), the silence of enforced inertia is hard to miss. Professors have to go out and queue up at Chennai's government departments to get salaries and promotions cleared. PhD theses await signatures that never come. Files gather dust. It's a picture replicated across Tamil Nadu's public universities—from Anna University down the road, to Bharathiar University in Coimbatore and Madurai Kamaraj University (MKU) in the south.

As many as 12 of the state's 22 public universities have been functioning without regular vice-chancellors (V-Cs) for over two years now, some for even longer. Not due to a lack of worthy candidates, or of funds. Blame it, instead, on a constitutional impasse. In less abstract terms, a bitter turf battle for control over universities between the state government and the governor that has become a big strand in debates around federalism.

THE FEDERAL QUESTION

R.N. Ravi, who took the gubernatorial office in 2021, has since impaled himself in a series of confrontations with M.K. Stalin's DMK regime. While mirroring the pattern in other Opposition-ruled states that brought the Governor's role under sharp political scrutiny, Tamil Nadu differed in how prolonged the stalemate became—and the knotty legal imbroglio it spawned.