Bangalore, March 10 :     The Karnataka Legislative Council was rocked today by the allegation that Union law minister M. Thambidurai was exerting pressure on the state government to allow shifting of an engineering college run by his wife from a rural location to Bangalore. Higher education minister B.A. Moinuddin told the House that Thambidurai?s wife, Bhanumathi, managing trustee of Bangalore College of Engineering and Technology, had applied for permission to shift the two-year-old college from Malur, in Kolar district, to Chandapura, near Bangalore. BJP floor leader M.R. Thanga and Congress member V.R. Sudarshan alleged that the government was in the process of yielding as the college management was keen to exploit the ?better returns? in Bangalore. Moinuddin said though the trust sought the change of location on the ground that the ?atmosphere of Malur was not conducive to running the college?, the government had turned down the request as it would adversely affect the students already admitted to its courses. He said the college was allowed in the first place to benefit students of a backward region like Malur and it could not change its location without the prior approval of the all-India Council of Technical Education, the state government and Bangalore University. Thanga said the move to start the college in Malur and then shift it to Bangalore was pre-planned as despite being in existence for two years, the management had failed to build permanent buildings and laboratories. The first-year classes were being held in a shack and the second-year students had been asked to go to Hosur on the Tamil Nadu-Karnataka border, where the trust ran another institution. Telephone calls to the trust?s office in Bangalore elicited no esponse.