Badal, who was in Patiala on Monday, said the government sent the letters after reviewing its earlier decision of supporting PU’s cause. “I have written to the Prime Minister and Union Human Resource Development Minister Arjun Singh not to grant central university status to PU.”

On August 26, the Punjab government had sent a communiqué to the Centre with regard to its go-ahead to the matter.

PU gets majority of funds from the Punjab government and it was felt that once it got the central status, the state would lose its control over the prestigious university.

Vice-Chancellor R C Sobti had sought the government’s help in getting a central status for the university. PU staff had earlier been sitting on a hunger strike in support of the demand.

Badal said Punjab had sought to set up a central university at Bathinda and a world-class university at Amritsar. He was in Patiala to lay the foundation stone of the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee’s Guru Granth Sahib World University.

Govt dissolves transfer orders of teachers
The process of rationalisation restarted again today when Assistant Director Public Instructions (Secondary Schools) Surjit Kaur dismissed the previous transfer orders of surplus teachers in government schools of the district. It was around 9 am that Kaur along with Ludhiana District Education Officer (Secondary) Sudesh Bajaj reached R S Model School in Shastri Nagar where the surplus teachers had been called. A new committee headed by Kaur asked all the teachers about the choice of their stations where there was a vacancy. By 6 pm, the list of surplus teachers in different government schools along with the vacancies in government schools of Khanna, Samrala, Payal, Raikot and Jagraon was out. However, the list of vacancies in government schools of Ludhiana (East) and Ludhiana (West) were not pasted for facilitating teachers to opt for station of their choice.