Berhampur: Severe staff shortage has hit academics and administration at one of Gajapati district's premier colleges, named after one of its most famous sons.

The Sri Krushna Chandra Gajapati Autonomous College at Paralakhemundi has been functioning with a principal for nearly three years and a staff of three out of the 57 sanctioned posts of lecturers for Plus Three and postgraduate courses.

Postgraduate mathematics and zoology departments function without a lecturer despite respective sanctioned posts of three and four, while an adhoc lecturer manages the entire commerce department. It has sanctions for five lecturers, said principal-in-charge Sanjaya Mallick.

"We face a lot of problems and it is hampering our studies," said students union president Kanhu Charan Bhuyan.

"Shortage of faculty and non-teaching staff members has been a problem for years. We have no permanent principal for three years," he said.

The students had also approached chief minister Naveen Patnaik and higher education minister Ananta Das about their problems ahead of the students' union elections in September. But all that went in vain, he said.

"We resorted to agitations to demand appointment of faculty members and also held talks with a University Grants Commission (UGC) team that had visited six months ago on the issue," he said.

In administrative terms as well, the college is short-staffed, functioning with 28 clerks, librarians, laboratory assistants and peons against a sanctioned strength of 78.

The college, founded under the patronage of the raja of Paralakhemundi, Goura Chandra Gajapati Narayana Deo, in 1896, was among the leading colleges in Odisha in the 1990s and is the state's second oldest college. When it celebrated its centenary, the postal department issued a commemorative stamp, a source said.

The government of Odisha took over management of the college in July 1947 and renamed after its patron Sri Krushna Chandra Gajapati.

Towards the end of 1948, it was shifted from its old building to the present Morrison Extension, named Maharaja's tutor Cameron Morrison. The college was conferred with the autonomous status in 2002 by the UGC.

"The autonomous status aimed to impart quality education, frame need-based curricula conforming with those prescribed by the Berhampur University and evolve the college's own methods of admission, evaluation and examinations, make the students aware of the relevance of theoretical knowledge to the practical demand of the changing world," said former Paralakhemundi Municipality chairman and alumnus Nrusingha Patnaik.

"But the present situation has completely ruined it. Appointment of good faculty members can only revive its past glory," he added.

The BJD's Gajapati district president, Pradip Nayak, another alumnus, said filling up vacant lecturers' posts should be top priority.

"I will discuss the issue with the higher education minister," he said.