Men, Matters & Memories
M L Kotru
For the fourth running day, as I write, I find thousands of young Indians, wide-eyed and bright, boys and girls from Delhi and distant Sates, braving the hellish heat, standing outside college gates and on the doorstep of Delhi University Vice Chancellor, hoping for the admission process to start. It so happens that the present set of Czars of the Education (HRD) Ministry and its vassal of the day, the University Grants Commission, seem scornful of the idea of calling it a day and to allow the admissions to the University’s 64 colleges start.
I am hopeful that by the time you get to read this the crisis inflicted on the hapless students and the parents of a few thousand, accompanying their wards on perhaps their first visit to Delhi and very keen to ensure that admission is secured in their presence.
It’s not a joke that the HRD Ministry and its head, Smriti Irani of the Saas-Bahu TV serial fame, seems to be playing on the admission-seeking thousands. One would have expected better understanding of the students’ plight from her.
Had she had serious doubts about the advisability of retaining the four-year degree course, as decreed by another HRD Minister in consultation with the University last year, replacing the earlier three-year pattern, she should not have kept her reservations to herself for the month she has held sway over the Ministry to spring it as a surprise on everyone just two days before admissions were to start.
Ms. Irani, flush from the accolades she earned from her Prime Minister for the fight she gave Rahul Gandhi in her losing campaign in Amethi, probably hoped to earn many more by using the University Grants Commission as her cat’s paw. She persuaded the UGC – it didn’t need much, anyway – to ask Delhi University to revert to its earlier 3-year degree programme. The UGC, reports have noted, virtually operated all these days from the HRD Ministry, to execute her plan. It didn’t make much sense for the UGC to have okayed the 4-year term last year when proposed by the Vice Chancellor Dinesh Singh and supported by the then HRD Minister, Kapil Sibal, who it is now alleged by the BJP,had insisted on its adoption because he was committed to doing the behest of foreign (US and British) universities.
The UGC obviously has gone flat out this time as well, when the present HRD presiding deity, Ms. Irani made her intent known.
Irani was obviously goaded by the Ahkil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad and the BJP’s men in the Delhi University Teachers’ Association – not to forget the role played by the biggest NGO of them all, and the guidance sprint behind the BJP, the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh – into scrapping “American agent Sibal’s” brainchild. UGC didn’t lose much time either. It quickly forgot that the Delhi University’s 93-year-old charter guarantees its autonomy; it also forgot that all such decisions fall within the domain of the University and its Academic Council.
The UGC revealed its hand on the first day of the crisis by telling the constituent colleges of the University that their funding (about 90 percent) by the UGC would be stopped if they did not adhere to the HRD diktat. The Ahkil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad meantime took to staging well orchestrated rallies, with pro-reversal pro-BJP DUTA teachers joining in stage dharnas. The pro-Autonomy teachers held their own sit-ins, not to speak of the other rallies, for and against the new HRD move.
Nobody, yes nobody, seemed worried about the future of the thousands admitted last year under what was the new dispensation then. Nor was anyone seriously concerned about the suffering inflicted on the thousands of fresh admission-seekers this year.
Why didn’t anyone think of the distress the political maneuverings of the present ruling dispensation in the HRD Ministry had caused to the freshers by its obduracy? For the record and without going into the merits or otherwise of it, the change effected last year provided for students opting out at the end of two years with a diploma, getting a degree after three years and an honours degree for those who completed the four-year course.
I don’t know whether that is good or bad but the Ministry should have known that the options don’t make the four -year programme all that obnoxious. I t should have persuaded it to hold its hand till such time as it had studied the programme thoroughly, its positives and negatives. Having marked it out as a programme initiated at the behest of Western universities by the previous regime, even if it was approved by the University’s Academic Council, the BJP’s Smriti Irani would have none of it. Y’ see even the RSS was opposed to the new scheme. And how could Ms. Irani have stood up to her mentors.
A Hindi channel put across the significance of the move rather saucily by arguing that “in Modiji’s Pathshala” Smirti Irani could not have dared to say no or to suggest a second look at the initiative handed down to her. The UGC has in recent times – no, may be for the last nearly three decades – become a very pliant institution. In this very space I have had occasion to focus attention on how the Commission was subsidizing any number of “colleges” sponsored or owned by influential politicians all over the country. A college with a faculty of 80 with less than two dozen students routinely receives without any qualms the 90 percent subsidy (salaries of teachers etc) from the UGC. I had in the same piece spoken of the Chancellor of all Bihar Universities (the State Governor) telling me how he had a hundred “Vice Chancellors” of all Bihar varsities, all flaunting doctorates bartered on a quid pro quo basis, one “naqli” V.C. of a “naqli” university (both recognized and aided) exchanging doctorates as a token of being partners in crime. The UGC lost its sheen many, many years ago. All these rich fake colleges and fake universities have been allowed to be around for numberless years, cash cows, if you will, courtesy a very pliant and obliging UGC.
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