#dnaEdit: Arbitrary actions

The standoff between the Delhi University(DU) and the University Grants Commission(UGC) over the Four-Year Undergraduate Programme(FYUP) could not have come at a more inopportune time for students and the DU’s affiliated colleges who are in the midst of this year’s admission process. Last year, DU vice-chancellor Dinesh Singh had caught college administrators, teachers and students unaware by rushing through the FYUP without inviting the various stakeholders for discussions. With a change of government and a human resources development(HRD) minister who has put on record her disapproval of the FYUP, the UGC, which appeared complicit in giving Singh a free hand last year, is now singing a different tune. Its directive to the DU and its college principals on Sunday giving them a day to scrap the FYUP and restore the erstwhile three-year programme is rivalled in its arbitrariness only by Singh’s high-handed actions last year. The UGC noted that the DU’s FYUP scheme violated the National Policy on Education, 1986, that envisaged a 10+2+3 educational structure. Further, the DU had not sought the mandatory permission of the President, who is the Visitor to the university, before introducing FYUP. 

It is unbelievable that the UGC was not aware of these miscarriages of policy and procedure when Singh, reportedly with the blessings of two former HRD ministers Kapil Sibal and Pallam Raju, rode roughshod.

The foundation and applied courses envisaged in the FYUP course  —  overturning the traditional BA/BSc/BCom degrees — by focussing on communication, IT, data-analysis and knowledge-based skills to improve soft-skills and employability — were universally panned. The haste involved in designing the foundation courses with trite classroom-based activities and exercises in subjects like grammar, IT, history and environment had the unintended effect of reducing university students to the level of their high-school counterparts and made a mockery of higher education. The UGC, with its overwhelming mandate to guide, reform and fund higher education efforts in India, were reduced to disinterested spectators even as an idea with the potential of aligning Indian collegiate systems with the US system suffered.

DU colleges, slated to announce the first cut-off lists from Monday, will now have to ponder how they can return to the BA/BSc/BCom system and allocate seats within these three degrees. While this can be rectified with some delay, restructuring courses for students who have already spent a year giving 67 per cent weightage to the foundation courses under FYUP, will pose more problems. With just two years left, colleges will have to pack in more of the students’ main subjects to recoup lost time. The fiasco also poses troubling questions about the UGC’s reasons for existence. Rather than taking the lead on an important reform in higher education, it allowed a university vice-chancellor to call the shots, and twice, first at the FYUP’s inception and now at its scrapping, appeared to take the cue from the HRD ministry without pursuing an independent course of action or initiating a reasoned and open debate. The UGC, which weathered a storm wrought by the draft Higher Education and Research Bill, 2011, that proposed to subsume it within a National Commission for Higher Education & Research, has been clearly caught on the wrong foot this time. Even as it sorts out the DU mess, it must consider the prospects of the FYUP system and come up with a better programme and a plan of action than the one spearheaded by Dinesh Singh.