Editor,
Alarming reports emerging from the Arunachal Pradesh University (APU) have raised serious questions about the integrity of its recent recruitment practices. As reported by The Arunachal Times on 10 October, 2025, these are not isolated lapses – they point to a systemic breakdown of fairness, expertise, and accountability in the university’s governance.
At the heart of this growing controversy lies an uncomfortable question: why are APU’s planning board and executive council members silent? When due process is openly flouted, silence is not neutrality – it is complicity.
The University Grants Commission (UGC) Regulations, 2018, clearly define how interview boards for faculty appointments must be constituted. External experts are to be nominated by the university planning board strictly on the basis of their subject-specific expertise. This rule is not bureaucratic red tape – it is the fundamental safeguard that ensures that candidates are judged by those who truly understand their discipline.
Yet, what has unfolded at the APU defies both logic and regulation. In the recruitment for the department of tribal studies, the so-called ‘subject experts’ included individuals from completely unrelated disciplines. One of them, Prof Debabrata Das, hails from the department of business administration, specializing in banking and finance. Another, Prof DK Limbu, is a physical anthropologist with expertise in dental anatomy and genetics. A third member, retired professor Bapukan Choudhary, is also from physical anthropology, with genetics, haemoglobin, and demographic studies as his areas of specialization.
How can individuals with no grounding in the humanities or social sciences evaluate candidates whose research lies in the cultural, ethnographic, and linguistic domains of tribal studies? This is not merely an administrative oversight; it is an academic absurdity. If such practices are allowed to stand, tomorrow mathematicians may well sit in judgement over applicants in history or political science.
These appointments reveal a blatant disregard for UGC norms. Such decisions do not occur in isolation – they are enabled, approved, and normalized by those in power. The responsibility lies squarely with the APU’s planning board and executive council, whose duty it is to ensure transparency, merit, and disciplinary integrity. When these bodies remain silent in the face of such mismanagement, their silence becomes endorsement.
Their inaction suggests either indifference to institutional decay or a tacit approval of it. The planning board and executive council possess not only the authority but also the moral obligation to act. Their continued silence undermines public faith in the APU’s ability to function as an academic institution guided by fairness and intellectual honesty.
The call to action is urgent and unambiguous: the governing bodies of the Arunachal Pradesh University must immediately rectify these irregularities. Academic appointments are not administrative conveniences; they form the moral backbone of a university. By confronting these issues directly, the APU’s leadership has an opportunity to restore its credibility. Failing to act, however, will confirm their complicity.
They should be mindful that hundreds of students and young scholars across the state are witnesses to these actions. They must recognize that their decisions or their refusal to act will go down in the history of Arunachal Pradesh. This moment will define not only the future of the APU but also the credibility of higher education in the state. They must decide now. Will they defend the integrity of the Arunachal Pradesh University, or be remembered as silent witnesses to its decline?
Aggrieved candidate