DU Students Protested against new PhD and MPhil UGC Guidelines
DU students protested against new UGC norms. The protest was held on Wednesday in the Arts Faculty block of Delhi University. It took the form of a hunger strike.They protested against norms rerequiri PhD and MPhil candidates to score a minimum of 50% in the entrance test to be eligible for admissions. The protest, scheduled to last the whole day from 8 am to 8 pm, consisted of more or less 20 students. They had stationed themselves outside gate 4 of the Arts Faculty block.
They demanded complete scrapping of the rule which required them to score 50 per cent in the exams. The students also wanted reinstatement of interview lists of all candidates from all categories. They also demanded that the weightage for written exams be 80 per cent and 20 percent for the interview. These were the demands for which the DU students protested.
The new norms were first introduced in the 2016 UGC Gazette notification as part of clause 5.4. According to these norms, students had to score at least fifty percent in the entrance exams. The syllabus would consist of 50 percent research methodology and 50 percent of it would be subject specific. The interview was to be organized the Higher Education Institution. DU students protested against these UGC norms.
Although these norms were issued on 2016, the university did not have to comply. This is because DU is a central university and had the right to constitute it’s own selection procedure. This, each department had already set their cut offs and releases lists. But after the notification was issued on the night of July 23rd, the initial interview were scrapped. Then the revised list was released which implemented the 50 percent rule. DU students protested against these new and sudden developments.
“There are a lot of other rules in the 2016 UGC Gazette which have not been implemented. So why implement this one rule all of a sudden?” said a student from the history department.
“And even the way it was done, it was so last minute. The initial list for the history department came out on July 17 and interviews were supposed to start from July 25. However, the UGC circular came out only on July 23. So we were informed barely two days before our interviews”, said the student. “There were so many students who came from distant place and on coming here, found out that their interviews had been cancelled. Not only is this very stressful and traumatic, but it’s also a strain financially for those who have travelled so far.”
DU students protested the new UGC norms. Do you protest it too?
