The Legislative Council took up the matter of not distributing gold medals to the meritorious students in the recently-held Convocation of Bangalore University (BU), yesterday.

The Opposition took a dig at the State Government stating the BU students were being mislead by giving them gold-coated medals. Higher Education Minister Basavaraja Rayareddy mentioned that the University awarded 203 gold medals every year and each medal was made of 20 gram silver and was coated with 1.3 gram gold.

The Minister said that the University does not award gold medals to the students if the interest earned by money deposited by donors was less than Rs. 4,000. He also mentioned that the interest earned through deposits was very meagre and it was not viable to fund gold medals.

However, few of the MLCs were not happy with the Minister’s reply. They said that the University instead of calling  it a gold medal must call them gold-coated medals.  

The MLCs also alleged that the Bangalore University charged from the students to award gold medal for which the Minister refuted the charges.