The Jawaharlal Nehru Students' Union (JNUSU) on Saturday submitted a memorandum to the Chairman of University Grants Commission (UGC) against the massive seat cut in M Phil and PhD programmes of JNU proposed in the admission prospectus for academic session 2017-18.
The memorandum cited reasons which are in favour of revocation of UGC Notification dated May 5, 2016.The memo states that the adherence to UGC guidelines will be detrimental to
JNU's autonomy and will be a massive blow to the University's socially inclusive admission policy which has evolved all through
the years.
"First and foremost, the seat cut has resulted in no admission in research programmes in major centres such as Political Science, History, Centre for Indian Languages and several other schools in this academic session," read the memorandum.
In the School of Social Sciences, all 13 centres had announced intake last year, but this year only two centres can have intakes of which Centre for Study of Regional Development has only one intake.
The memo highlighted the removal of the decade old deprivation point system which was considered as JNU's
unique feature.
"Instead of using the UGC notice to justify the decreasing of the number of seats in research programs, shouldn't there be a focus on filling up teaching vacancies in the university and expanding
faculty strength," stated the memo.Further, the memorandum demanded that JNU should be allowed to uphold its institutional autonomy and prepare a robust defence of its current M Phil and PhD
admission policy along with the Nafey Committee recommendations.
Also, present it to the UGC as a model that already fulfil the principles that might have guided many of the specific technical provisions of the UGC Gazette Notification.