Thwarting Social Justice In Education: Reporting From Hyderabad Uni
Abhishek Nandan
Higher education spaces in India are increasingly becoming inaccessible to students from the marginalised and underprivileged sections of the society. Instead of devising a policy that can create more opportunities for such students to enter the arena of academics, the central government has smuggled in the New Education Policy 2020. It maintains iniquitous silence on issues like reservation and only aims to turn the sector of education into a business by privatising it.
Even before the policy, the BJP-led union government had been cutting down funds for public universities and education in general. We saw how during the COVID-19 lockdown, they attempted to freeze national fellowships for the country’s research scholars, pushing them to go through severe financial crisis and mental agony. From enhancing the existing digital divide by suddenly shifting the pedagogy to online without any infrastructure preparation and holding scholarships back, to conducting end semester examinations when the pandemic was at its peak and the undemocratic implementation of NEP, every step the central government took was draconian and condemnable.
Now the new academic session has begun amidst the pandemic, when the lockdown is still in practice, without any clarity on how to go about higher education and research. Almost all higher educational institutes of the country continue to conduct nationwide entrance examinations for both masters and research programmes. Despite massive discontent and protests, they went on with their entrance exams, disregarding the severity of the pandemic and related travel restrictions, and the unavailability of temporary accommodation in many cities. As a result, attendance in these was reportedly meagre. Those who were hard hit by these insensitive and thoughtless moves were those belonging to the economically weaker and marginalised sections of the society.
The University of Hyderabad
The University of Hyderabad’s entrance examinations were carried out simultaneously with NTA-NET, despite many protests by the university’s students’ union. In fact, some states in the North East of the country didn’t even have a single exam centre and even after pointing out such pitfalls, the university administration was not ready to step back.
A week before the publishing of the results, the administration mandated all academic units to strictly abide by the UGC Regulation 2016, which defines a Minimum Qualifying Mark criteria to attend MPhil/PhD, i.e. 50% marks in the entrance for General and EWS, and 45% for SC/ST/OBC/PWD categories. Similar to what the NDA government has been doing in the centre, the university administration was also attempting to implement their anti-student moves, using the pandemic and the lockdown as veils. Contrary to the norm in the university, the Academic Council meeting was held without the participation of the students’ union President and General Secretary.
The UoH has been calling candidates in the 1:6 criteria for research programmes, and even then, the administration was failing to ensure the admission of students in all the reserved seats. In the academic year 2019-20, fourteen reserved seats were left vacant. This year, due to the exclusionary and very discriminatory minimum mark criteria, more than 70 seats were found vacant even before interviews, of which 68 were reserved category seats. In fact, 54 seats were found vacant in the School of Humanities, the largest school in the university. Almost all PH seats remain vacant, and considering the hardships physically challenged students have had to go through to appear for the entrance exams, this is nothing less than cruelty.
The UoH does not have a uniform entrance exam pattern — each academic unit is conferred with the liberty to design their own examination pattern. Thus, the entrance pattern varies across departments and the decision to employ negative marking is also as per departmental discretion. Implementing a blanket criterion to shortlist students, therefore, is impractical and unjust, as the parameters of objective, partially objective and descriptive exams aren’t the same. Moreover, there are research programmes that are interdisciplinary in nature — to expect candidates to crack 50% and 45% in such subjects is too high a standard to demand, especially when libraries are shut and access to scholarly materials is limited even to those with institutional access. Besides, the adoption of the criterion that was issued in 2016 now — amidst pandemic, when the university has been locked down — reveals the intensity of casteist and classist mindset of the administration. The issue becomes especially grave when one realises that this has been done when the possibility of protest, in a scale similar to the one that happened in 2017 when the administration had attempted to implement it before, is feeble. The sudden decision, taken bypassing the academic council norms, should be suspected as an agenda to fulfil their hunger for meritocracy, by excluding those deprived of facilities and accessibility. The university knows very well that only the upper caste-class elite sections will be able to crack these cut-offs and what they aim is to reserve the campus exclusively for such students.
The union called for an indefinite protest and sat on a relay hunger strike for six days and only after that did the administration bend down to consider putting out a second list for interviews. But the regulation of 2016 was so ill-devised and structurally exclusionary that even after the first and second round of interviews, the scenario only worsened. A total of 100 seats (20 in MPhil and 80 in PhD) are left unclaimed, and UoH, the “institute of eminence”, stands in utter shame and defencelessness — as in certain departments, no doctoral programme was even offered this session.
The UoHSU is determined to take this issue to the coming academic council and demand an unconditional withdrawal of this exclusionary policy. We will demand the reinstating of the previously followed 1:6 criteria, where predefined cut-offs do not exist and the cut-offs will be decided according to the relative performance of the candidates.
A Countrywide Phenomenon: Where Are the SC-ST Scholars?
What is sadder is that this is something unique to the University of Hyderabad — almost all higher educational institutes in India are made to go through a similar condition during the NDA regime. To emphasise this, we have the shocking RTI data which reveals that in IIT Bombay, 11 out of 26 departments and centres did not admit a single research scholar from the ST category in the last four years. Even while mandating that no reserved seat must be left vacant, the UGC cunningly shrugs off their responsibility to design a strict law in this regard, which would ensure the proper implementation of it. Ideally, a thorough enquiry must have already taken place about how and why a vast number of research seats are reportedly vacant in our higher educational institutes. Instead, the central government is busy facilitating the privatisation and commercialisation of education, turning it to a commodity that can be accessed only by the privileged.
Through policy itself, students from vulnerable and marginalised sections are excluded from the sector of higher education. Pre-decided cut-offs are a covert way to practice elitism and meritocracy — that a standardised cut-off cannot be implemented in research programmes is a matter of common sense as question banks, performance of candidates and external factors vary each year. Relative marking and preparing a list of candidates five times to the available number of seats, where competition will happen in terms of research proposals and conception of potential research concepts, is the only alternative to the allocation of higher educational spaces exclusively to elites.
The state’s responses to the many cries for social justice is mockery and aggression. Massive resistance has to be built to force the central government and the UGC to look into this grave violation of constitutional promises and to ensure that social mobility of historically oppressed and exploited is not hindered.
Abhishek Nandan is the President of the University of Hyderabad Students’ Union and a PhD Scholar at the Department of Hindi of the university.
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