After 46 years, JNU will hold its convocation on August 8

NEWDELHI: After a gap of almost 46 years, the Jawaharlal Nehru University will hold its second-ever convocation on August 8 this year to award PhD degrees to research scholars.

The university held its first convocation in 1972, three years after it was established in 1969.

“This is to inform you that the second Convocation of Jawaharlal Nehru University is scheduled to be held on 08th August 2018 to confer Ph.D. degree to the students of the University,” said the university’s notification posted on its website on Saturday.

The notification on the university website said, “All research scholars, who have completed the requirements for the Ph.D. degree, between January 1, 2017 and June 30, 2018 are eligible for the conferment of Ph.D. degree at the convocation.”

The university has asked eligible students to register online at jnu.ac.in/convocation for obtaining their PhD degree certificate in convocation and at cvl.nad.co.in to obtain a digital copy of the certificate.

Students can register till August 15.

The university has also constituted a 19-member committee for smooth conduct of the event.

The first and only convocation at JNU till now was held in 1972, when noted actor and theatre personality Balraj Sahni had given the convocation address, which Kamal Mitra Chenoy, a professor at the Centre for Comparative Politics and Political Theory, had described earlier as a “radical speech” .

Sahni, according to a transcript of the speech, called for “a messiah to give us the courage to abandon our slavishness and to create values befitting the human beings of a free and independent country so that we may have the courage to link our destinies to the ones being ruled, and not the rulers — to the exploited and not to the exploiters.”

G Parthasarathi was the vicechancellor at the time of the first convocation.