DU staff, students protest against autonomy move

The present scheme is not aimed at giving any real academic autonomy, instead it gives managerial autonomy to governing bodies and trustees of individual colleges...

Thousands of teachers, students and non-teaching staff of different Delhi University colleges marched in central Delhi protesting the government’s scheme of granting autonomy to the colleges.

Calling the scheme to grant “autonomous status” to DU’s constituent colleges a move to break the university, a delegation of teachers also submitted a memorandum to the ministry of human resource and development.

In DU, it is mostly the trustrun colleges that have been asked to apply for the autonomous colleges. There are 24 trust-run colleges under DU. St Stephen’s has taken the lead in applying for autonomy as per the guidelines of the University Grants Commission (UGC). Many students and teachers of the college, who are against the move, also marched from Mandi House to Jantar Mantar.

“The present scheme is not aimed at giving any real academic autonomy, instead it gives managerial autonomy to governing bodies and trustees of individual colleges. It puts the onus of resource-generation, maintenance and expansion of infrastructure on colleges. It will push undergraduate education in DU colleges towards more commercialisation, unreasonable hikes in student-fee and drastic cost-cutting,” said Nandita Narain, president, DU teachers association (DUTA), who were leading the protest.

The teachers and ‘karamcharis’ expressed anxiety that in the guise of ‘autonomy’, governing bodies and trusts will be free to take decisions, which will have an adverse impact on their service conditions and remuneration structure.

The protesters carried placards and shouted slogans drawing attention to other long-pending demands of the teachers like the implementation of the court order on pensions, absorption of the ad-hoc teachers and immediate implementation of Pay Revision for teachers that has been long delayed.

Congress leader, Gaurav Gogoi, also joined the rally and lent his support to the demands of the Delhi University community.