Scholarships, endowments go begging

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Scholarships and endowments worth at least Rs 10 crore meant for students of schools and colleges in Kerala have been lying unutilised for decades.The level of apathy has been such that in many cases authorities of educational institutions are unaware as to when they stopped claiming the interest on the corpus fund vested with the Local Fund Audit Department (LFAD) for charitable endowments. LFAD Director K K Rajan, who is also the Treasurer of Charitable Endowments, told Express that many institutions had not been claiming the interest for the past many decades.“Over Rs 30 lakh is accrued as interest every year on educational endowments. The same could be distributed to hundreds of students,” Rajan said.The corpus fund deposited with the Andhra Bank, Manakad; Corporation Bank,  Vellayambalam; SBT, Sasthamangalam; and Government Treasury, Thiruvananthapuram, amounts to Rs 82,650, with a cash balance of Rs 42,585.42.“The administrators may submit an application along with fund utilisation certificate of previous years to get their funds released,” Rajan added.One of the earliest endowment scholarships, instituted in 1914, of which the administrator is the University College Council, has been lying non-operational for several years.The Read Memorial Scholarship (instituted in 1915) and V Rama Iyer Scholarship Fund (1915)  have securities worth `49,150 and `90,550 and cash balance of  `24,137 and `43,481, respectively.Many authorities of educational institutions  are even unaware of the endowments they are entitled to.The University College here has dozens of scholarships instituted in its favour. But University College Principal K B Ajith Kumar was candid enough to admit that he did not know how many of them were unoperational. “A new Principal assuming charge might not be aware of details of all these scholarships,” he reasoned.As per Kerala Gazette Extraordinary on LFAD dated October 13, 2010, out of the 1,316 charitable endowments vested with the LFAD, only around 250 accounts were operational.“As of now we have only four employees, including an audit officer, to monitor over 1,300 endowments. An Additional Director should be appointed to make the functioning of the association more effective,” said A Nizamudeen, an officer of the Kerala Local Fund Audit Association.