DU 4-year programme: Chorus to junk Sibal's pet project gets louder

The BJP-led government’s move to review Delhi University’s four-year undergraduate programme (FYUP), has put a question mark on the future of what was seen as one of Kapil Sibal’s pet projects. The FYUP, which was part of the former HRD minister’s aggressive reform agenda for higher education in India, was widely criticised for the hurried manner in which it was pushed through by the Delhi University (DU) vice-chancellor Dinesh Singh, despite widespread opposition from students and teachers.

Keen to deliver on BJP’s election promise to roll back the four year DU programme, HRD minister Smriti Irani is reported to have told a delegation DU teachers and students who met her on 30 May that she would hold “widespread consultation at all levels” on the issue. She has since met other delegations, also demanding scrapping the FYUP, led by BJP’s student wing Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) and the BJP-backed National Democratic Teachers Front (NDTF).

Careful not to be seen as acting out-of-turn or in a hurry, Irani has maintained that while she would not take any decision that would “harm students and the DU faculty”, she would not “transgress” DU’s autonomous status.

Meanwhile, student groups on campus have intensified their protests to build public pressure to roll back the FYUP. In a rare show of consensus, both left and right-wing student groups been holding protests and public meetings against the FYUP. Even the National Students’ Union of India (NSUI), the student wing of the Congress party, which for obvious reasons had remained cold to the campaign against FYUP last year, has now jumped on to the protest bandwagon.

The introduction of FYUP in DU, which made it the only university in India to have adopted a US-style degree programme, was seen as of part vice-chancellor Dinesh Singh’s push for reforms, which began with a shift to the semester system in 2010.

Singh’s main argument for the drastic redesign of DU’s undergraduate programme was that it would prepare students to meet corporate India’s needs and make them more ‘employable’.

When the ‘Save DU’ campaign (launched by students and teachers last year to oppose the FYUP) was at its peak, Singh surprised many when he said that “not a single DU student” met corporate job standards.

The 11 compulsory foundation courses in the FYUP, Singh had argued, would improve a student’s “communication, data and analytical skills.” The charge against Singh was that he had pushed the FYUP in a “hurried and undemocratic” manner.

In a petition that was submitted last year  to then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh as part of the ‘Save DU’ campaign, academics and civil society members had also argued that the FYUP would “pave the way for further fee hikes, privatisation and commodification and dilute the comprehensive character of education.”

“A change as big as this should have gone through after three-four years of debate but it was passed in a matter of three days…All the existing courses – BA, B.Com, BSc, BA Honours - that had been put together with a lot of deliberation had been thrown out. Instead they had a four-year structure in which more than one-fourth was compulsory school-level courses. We opposed it. Intellectuals from across the country opposed it. But it was still pushed through,” says Nandita Narain, president of the Delhi University Teachers’ Union (DUTA). A vocal critic of the FYUP, Narain is head of the Mathematics department at St Stephen’s college.

The first batch of FYUP students has now completed their first year. While DU’s official survey claims that 80 percent of the students are happy with FYUP, surveys conducted by teachers and student groups tell a different story.

According a survey conducted in August, 2013, by the radical left All India Students’ Association (AISA), out of the 11,556 students surveyed, 10,519 students (91 percent) had voted against the FYUP. According to the findings of a DUTA survey conducted in December 2013 that had sought responses from 930 students from colleges including Miranda House, St Stephen’s, SRCC and Dyal Singh College, 85 percent of the students said they preferred a three year degree programme.

Among those who’ve completed a year under FYUP and are demanding that it be scrapped is Pritish Menon, a BA Economics student from Deshbandhu College. “I feel that the four year programme is nothing like the dream that was sold to us. The foundations courses are utterly ridiculous. We were told that the foundation courses would make us employable. It is my honours degree that will provide me employment, not a foundation course that teaches me about prime numbers and how the solar system works.”

The four year programme, says Menon, has also put the students from under-privileged backgrounds at a disadvantage because of the additional costs of an extra year.

Asked whether students who were disappointed with FYUP were hopeful of seeing the decision reversed, Menon said, “Before the new government came, we felt frustrated because the Congress would not listen to us. Now the BJP government has taken up the issue and we are putting pressure on them. We voted for them because it was in their manifesto that they would roll back FYUP. Now they have won, they have to deliver,” says Menon.

That’s not to say FYUP has no takers at all.

“In my view that foundation courses are good. I am B.Tech computer science but I don’t want to be limited to science. I’ve got to learn a little about business. So when I get into the job market, I will have some basic knowledge. This is the era of inter-disciplinary learning. We should know everything. My only suggestion is that we should have the freedom to choose the foundation courses we want to study. But on the whole, we are very satisfied with first year of the FYUP,” says Sparsh Singhal, a second year B.Tech student from Maharaja Agrasen College.

Singhal and his classmate Ansh Goyal feel student groups have turned the protest political and that the anti-FYUP campaigns are dominated by third and fourth year students who have no experience of the new programme.

With the intensification of protests on campus some students are also worried about what a roll back would mean for those who have already enrolled in the FYUP programme. Stopped in the middle of a protest by a group of worried second year FYUP students, NSUI spokesperson Amrish Ranjan Pandey tried to explain to why a roll-back won’t affect them.

“When a new system is introduced, those in the old system will not be affected. We were in the second year when the semester system was introduced. But it did not affect us, we continued with the old system. We will not put your future in jeopardy,” Ranjan tells them.

With admissions for the next academic session underway and the DU vice-chancellor determined as ever to continue with FYUP, all eyes will be on the HRD minister to see how she handles the challenge.