Bankruptcy of Ideas or Deliberate Attempt to Finish off Public Funded Universities
Democratic Teachers' Front | 12 June 2024
The UGC has taken a decision to allow Higher Education Institutions to allow admissions twice a year. This UGC decision was earlier in regard to Open and Distance Learning (ODL) and Online modes only.
The UGC has not clarified whether these students will fit in with the regular batch and their academic calendar, or whether they will get a fresh start with their own academic calendar.
It must be noted that HEIs do not have the infrastructure and manpower to run two different academic calendars simultaneously. The formula applied to ODLs cannot be applied to institutions offering regular courses. Remember, ODLs have ostensibly no constraints on the number of admissions because of their format of education.
On the other hand, if the second batch has to fit in with the first one, then this will create an impossible situation for the students as well as their teachers. As the number of seats is not being increased, students will only be able to fit in left-over seats from the regular batch and this will reduce the opportunities of change of major for the already admitted students. So this policy will also undercut the promise of flexibility that has been the major selling point of the new curricula.
The policy caters to a market that may not exist. This is because students, who did not take admissions in the first place, may be preparing again for competitive exams like NEET, JEE, CLAT and CUET.
It should be pointed out that Central Universities (CU), including Delhi University, have not received additional funds for the implementation of EWS Expansion 2019, which increased the intake by 25%. Nor has the Government sanctioned any grants for increased infrastructure and human resource for the additional year of the Four Year UG Programme implemented under NEP 2020. FYUP may cause up to 33% expansion and strain on the system.
It is also important to point out that with CUET based admissions, seats remained vacant in many DU Colleges across courses despite the fact that admissions continued till half way through the semester. The situation in various CUs is much worse because the CUET has created an additional hurdle for students seeking admissions. Thus, the real problems are the delays and inefficiencies due to over-centralisation and lack of institutional autonomy. This policy is an attempt to cover these faults with a band aid. The long term intention seems to be the substitution of the in person teaching learning process with online tuition which will undermine the standard of education.
It is baffling that policies are announced without responding to stakeholders' concerns regarding their feasibility and their impact on the quality of education.
For over a decade, CUs, especially DU, are being treated as experimental labs for such thoughtless educational policies. We apprehend that the new policies are intended to deliberately create difficulties for public funded universities. Public higher educational institutions have till now served as the principal means of increasing access to education for all especially those from the deprived sections. The first major announcement of the new union government of India with respect to higher education involves, as before, an attempt to undermine public higher educational so that private higher education may get an undue advantage. The teachers' movement of the country must come together to counter and defeat this move to undermine the very basis of the existence of India as a nation of educated citizens.
𝐍𝐚𝐧𝐝𝐢𝐭𝐚 𝐍𝐚𝐫𝐚𝐢𝐧, 𝐏𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐢𝐝𝐞𝐧𝐭
𝐀𝐛𝐡𝐚 𝐃𝐞𝐯 𝐇𝐚𝐛𝐢𝐛, 𝐒𝐞𝐜𝐫𝐞𝐭𝐚𝐫𝐲