The Delhi High Court on Thursday dismissed a plea against the procedure followed by the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) to implement a notification by the University Grants Commission (UGC) that a professor cannot guide more than three M Phil and eight PhD research scholars at any given time.
Justice V K Rao refused to grant any relief to JNU students who contended that the UGC notification, dated May 5, 2016, "threatens to put our future in jeopardy as we would not be able to find a research supervisor or guide due to the said notification."
The JNU authorities told the Court that the notification was binding on all universities and that 43 central universities were already abiding by it.
The authorities said that the University will neither receive grants nor could award degrees if it stopped following the UGC regulations.
The notification was adopted by the University during its 142nd Academic Council meeting on December 26, 2016, amid protests from several council members.
The students argued that the notification's ramifications will extend beyond existing researchers and lead to fewer admissions of research aspirants in the upcoming academic session.
Both existing and prospective students, who moved the High Court, agreed to undertake that they were not challenging the UGC notification but restricting their case to "procedural lapses" on the JNU's part in adopting the notification.
The students said that JNU did not include representatives of students in the meetings held to discuss the notification's implementation.
Earlier, the students' main concern over the notification – which is the reduction of seats in the M Phil and PhD programmes and the University's refusal to consider the issue – had led to massive protests, hunger strikes and protests in the administrative block of the University. Students blockaded the entire ad-block area and stopped allowing the University to function, demanding revocation of the decision of seat cuts.