NEW DELHI, 27/04/2018: Members of Delhi University Teachers Association (DUTA) staging a protest outside University Grants Commission Office against granting of autonomy to colleges , in New Delhi on Thursday . Photo: V. Sudershan | Photo Credit: V_sudershan more-in The Delhi University Teachers’ Association (DUTA) led a protest against the Commission’s move to push 35 Delhi University (DU) colleges to accept the “autonomy” scheme outside the University Grants Commission (UGC) office on Friday. DUTA said that by giving administrative and financial autonomy to private trusts, the UGC wishes to turn these prestigious DU colleges into teaching shops. Self-financed courses The protest was organised when a meeting was in progress at the UGC headquarters, in which principals of 35 DU colleges gathered to discuss the modalities through which financial autonomy can be granted to these colleges to enable them to start self-financed courses. Appealing to college principals to resist the move and raise its concerns with the UGC, DUTA said the autonomous college scheme was a “sinister strategy” on the part of the current government to “dismember” the university and wash its hands off the responsibility of ensuring that 4,500 vacant teaching positions are filled and the second tranche of OBC expansion posts is released so that a healthy student-teacher ratio can be maintained. “So far, the experience of autonomous colleges has been very poor. Autonomy has resulted in a sharp decline in the academic quality in the erstwhile prestigious colleges like Ravenshaw University in Cuttack and Presidency University in Kolkata. There is a drastic rise in education cost, informalisation in faculty and staff appointments, adverse service conditions and pronounced commercialisation of courses and degree programmes,” DUTA president Rajib Ray said. The “dubious model of autonomy and privatisation” had nothing to do with academic freedom, DUTA stated. It added that neither the MHRD nor the UGC had discussed the proposal with teacher representatives despite them putting on record strong reservations against the autonomy scheme.

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