By Mohammed Siddique, TwoCircles.net,
Hyderabad: A Muslim woman politician from Maharashtra has donated five acres of land in the historic city of Aurangabad to the Hyderabad based Maulana Azad National Urdu University (MANUU) for setting up a university campus there.
Fauzia Tehseen, Member of Legislative Council of Maharashtra announced donating the land during a visit to MANUU in Hyderabad on the invitation of the university management.
Profusely thanking the lady for her generous gesture, the pro vice chancellor of MANUU Prof K R Iqbal Ahmad said that the proposed campus at Aurangabad will have courses like B.Ed., Polytechnic and an Urdu model school.
Fauzia Tehseen along with a delegation of Maharashtra went around the sprawling campus of Urdu University at Gachi Bowli area and saw a number of buildings including the main administrative block.
About her donation of land she said that this way she wanted to serve the Urdu language. “The University campus in Aurangabad will be a precious gift to the historic city”, she said.
Tehseen also requested the MANNU authorities to extend the activities of the university to Prabhani city, which has a sizeable population of Urdu speaking people. Iqbal Ahmad assured her that the university will start vocational courses in Prabhani very soon.
In his briefing to the delegation Prof. Iqbal Ahmad said that distance education courses offered by the university have as many as 1.5 lakh students, half of them women. “Half of our total women students are housewives”, he said adding that the distance education courses were becoming more popular.
Aurangabad is the fifth place where land has been donated for the Urdu University. Prof. Iqbal Ahmad said that earlier people had donated lands at Darbhanga, Bhopal, Bangalore and Haryana for the campuses.
Maulana Azad National Urdu University was set up under an act of Parliament passed in 1998 and has come a long way during the last one decade.