Rollback of FYUP ....

For me, rollback of FYUP simply means flushing out the importance of Foundation Courses.

The main argument on which the need of this FYUP structure was based on, itself defeats the purpose of this much hyped exercise. Those few who support FYUP often say that the employing industries feel that students who used to pass out from the earlier Three Year graduation scheme were not found job-ready and they had to be trained for six months or an year to make them 'employable'. Although this statement is an exaggeration at least for those who used to choose academics and research as their career but leaving this point aside even if I agree to their contention, according to their own admission, the students were even earlier becoming job-ready after completing four years of registering for a graduation course. The 'employ-ability quotient' that earlier students were acquiring rightly at the expense of the employing industry is now being done by financial burdening the students. Not only this, but there is no guarantee even now that these students will not have to go through the mandatory 'trainee period' whenever they get a job in an industry. A logical conclusion of their understanding of the situation would have been that the students who were earlier either unable to clear their graduation exams or were able to do that could have been offered an additional year of optional courses at the college. For these students, who had intentionally chosen not to pursue a career in academics and research, this additional year could have been run in collaboration with the employing industries to provide them an opportunity to earn the desired 'employ-ability quotient' ending in their employment at the same place.

One can make the existing FYUP a TYUP just by adequately replacing the Foundation Courses with DC I/II papers. Not only that but all the positive features of the Foundation Courses can also be retained by asking students to work for a project that they would be required to submit by the end of their second year. And the nature of this project should be such that they include features as collection, analysis and interpretation of data by students in a group of around ten students preferably of different backgrounds. Besides this, it should also include writing about the project by each student and presentation of the same too on an individual basis. Encouraging gradually the use of laptops, computers, Internet (searches and social media) and projectors even in regular discipline courses should also be welcomed.

Arrogance of Education : In the context of HRD ministry

It is a case of colonial mindset that has established the supremacy of literary knowledge over wisdom. Wisdom comes from experience and the way that you lap up the opportunity you get in your life. We are yet to learn that any education system only helps in getting the opportunity but how to make use of that is never prompted by your acquired degrees. Though slightly less prevalent in Sciences it is somehow commonplace in Social Sciences to count and weigh the bibliography attached to one's statement before even giving it a hearing. Earlier to British invasion we probably never had a tradition of measuring the importance to a saying by weighing its originator. Traditionally we have been otherwise told that true knowledge is what that makes you bow with humility and prepares you to remain open for wisdom that can come from any quarter. The prevalent education started primarily by Britishers and later developed through Left-leaning brand of 'intellectuals' were wary of the vast knowledge and wisdom then existed in this ancient country and just out of fear established a rule to set aside all potential challenges to their fiefdom. They made reading, rote learning, passing exams and acquiring degrees essential for getting heard and noticed.

It is exactly this mind set that rates an English speaking fool better than someone arguing in a regional language. It is exactly this mindset that makes Mani Shankar Aiyar so rude to a 'tea seller' Modi. It is this rotten system of education that has injected arrogance into Maken who wants to stop a Smriti getting a chance to perform fearing that her performance might not give him another chance to raise such doubts. Kapils and Tharoors are the glaring products of this system who acquired arrogance through their degrees and have become completely non-receptive to any idea that has not originated from their school of thoughts. And for those who still doubt in this wisdom should at least learn from the attitude of the students of Harward University and IIM who did not ask Lalu to show his management degrees when he was called to deliver a lecture to share his experience in managing Indian Railways. I just hope that just an 'educated' Vivekananda had to roam around in search for an 'uneducated' Guru Ramkrishna Paramhans for his enlightenment, others do not find it that hard to get one of their own. Sri Aurobindo, a great yogi of Bengal once said: "India became free on the day when arrogant youth (Swamy Vivekananda) who had been to British schools bowed down humbly before the illiterate saint, knowing that he carried within him a greater power." 

Education, in true sense, is a progressive discovery of your own ignorance.

MAXIMUM GOVERNMENT AND MINIMUM GOVERNANCE - A case study with respect to Delhi University

The Current Scenario
It is now clear that, either borrowed or of its own or a mixture of these, the University seems to have some vision of what it would like to become in a few years' time. At the same time however, it also appears to be having no clues of how to realize the same. Let us, in the present discourse, postpone any discussion on the utility, need and reason behind the continuous experimentation that are being conducted during the last few years in Delhi University and focus only on the logistics part of their attempt to implement those new ideas. Can we ignore that when the University decided to semesterize the undergraduate courses that required us to conduct examinations twice a year, the examination department was actually finding it difficult to make the ends meet while conducting annual examinations. Didn't we witness that when they decided to centralize sports admissions, they did not have any clue on how to handle it. We also noticed that when they decided to implement FYUP they did not have a clear road-map of its various stages of implementation, initially they forgot to bother about how time-tables would be prepared for the newly structured courses. As a matter of fact when they came up with the idea of having Foundation Courses, they did not have any idea of how these courses would actually run in a college; who would teach these courses; how would these teachers be appointed. What all infrastructure related difficulties would arise when teachers would be required to use internet while teaching a Foundation Course; how many teachers of a single department would be required for such courses that was aimed at teaching the entire first year, seems to be no one's problem at all. When they decided to get each of the answer sheet evaluated by three examiners, they did not think about the absurdities that may arise out of this decision. When they decided to get the attendance uploaded each month in the colleges they did not think how it would be done. When they decided to offer first preference of DC-II courses to the FYUP students, they did not foresee the near-impossibility of its implementation. When they decided to have Foundation courses, they never realized there were few teachers who had any idea of how to utilize the periods allocated for these generic papers. IMBH is still only an ornamental paper for a huge majority of teachers. When they decided to ask teachers to teach through laptops and projectors, they did not count how many teachers were actually good enough to make use of these modern equipments and gadgets. To add to this list is of difficult-to-implement tasks is that when it was decided to call only those applicants for teaching posts who would score more than a particular threshold marks, nobody thought that a topper of under-graduation and post-graduation will be left behind even if he/she has qualified the NET/JRF test.

The real Problem

Where are we going wrong? It is obviously in planning and preparation. There is a clear case of missing out on the logistic details from the point of view of at least the implementation of their own ideas. All these decisions that were taken without working out a well researched strategy, threatened to create one crisis after the other. Having no idea of how to solve these continuing crisis they seem to have invented a method to tackle the unmanageable imbroglios. The University is passing all such problems to the colleges assuming that the colleges would somehow manage the crisis. They think their task is now only to keep on insisting the colleges to somehow show a scenario of successful implementation. The colleges are in such a difficult situation wherein they are not even expected to discuss the difficulties in the implementation when letter after letters are being dispatched with deadlines of various kinds of implementation. The delivery mechanism is not on anyone's agenda. They think that after empowering the Principals they are left only with a task to catch hold of them for not being able to deliver according to their wishes.

Just to have some idea about the difficulties being faced by the colleges, let me explain this with some real examples. Just imagine if only someone had attempted to force the implementation of providing daily balance-sheets/inventory-reports in a large mall or a bank without computerization then what would have happened? If someone had wanted a daily update of all rail/air tickets booked from all over the country for all trains/planes without a computerized reservation system in place, what would it have led to? If stock market shares inventory-reports are to be provided on a daily basis without computers then what would be the scenario? Any of these demands would have thrown the system in a complete disarray. It is not impossible to understand that nobody could have provided the desired reports manually even if the concerned management was empowered to employ as many persons as required and even if they were given a go ahead to hire and fire all those who were not able to deliver.

Tackling Strategy

In this age of computerization, when one could actually simulate a working model before asking for the implementation of any idea, our University seems to have been ignoring this vital aspect of management. Asking a college to scan and upload attendance is one thing but nobody seems to have bothered to work out the time of scanning of around 1000 pages submitted by 200 odd teachers in a particular college that would be required if one has an idea of how much time an average scanner takes per page. Not only this, but the fact that a scanned page is generally of a few MBs (and not of a few KBs as it happens for a WORD-page) only adds to the difficulty in scanning and the time consumption in uploading the same. Nobody seems to be interested in these calculations. How many persons would be required to issue, re-issue, accept and keep the returned laptops for around 1000 students seems to be of nobody's baby in the University. How would a college be able to manage double the intake capacity of admission without the sanction of second tranche of teaching posts seems to be bothering no one in this University. One could have seen smooth implementation of many of these ideas if only a centralized software (just as the Exam software is now at some helpful stage of implementation) would have been installed. Once a software for creating time-tables and also of keeping students' attendance/internal marks is put in place, then only one can think of asking the teachers to enter the data supposed to be provided by him/her. The software could have then been used to generate room-wise and/or other such useful reports. If the Foundation Courses were introduced only after uploading sufficient material for assisting teachers teaching these courses, the situation would not have been so bad. Similarly, instead of just scolding colleges for managing admissions if the University could have developed an online admission process then the process would have got smoothly executed without any hick-ups and much to the satisfaction of the admission seekers. I see it as a complete failure on the part of the University officials that we do not have a comprehensive admission software which could have reduced the interaction of colleges with the admission seekers to almost nil. The failure is all the more evident as we do admissions only mechanically on the basis of the merit - a perfect recipe to qualify for computerization.  

Conclusion

Not that everything was perfect in pre-FYUP or for that matter pre-Semester era but at least we all had a fair idea of what was expected from each one of us then. Coming year may see a smoother functioning but an initial bad-show normally causes a greater damage of reputation and makes is really difficult to revert. I would conclude this discussion with a final remark that one can go on inflating the size/number of the University officials but with no strategy of proper governance in place, the crisis is destined only to deepen.

This is a clear case of Maximum Government and Minimum Governance – just opposite to the Modi's mantra.

DUTA movement : Is there a way ahead ?

Present State of affairs

At present the DUTA (Delhi University Teachers' Association) movement is clearly in the most challenging state ever. As the era of heroes has gone, we have progressively witnessed our heroes becoming more and more human whereas oppressors have become more and more inhuman. I can myself genuinely point out many lapses of the DUTA leaderships that have been instrumental in throwing us into this state of despair. Here, I would consciously avoid blaming someone for the growing indifference among teachers towards DUTA and pat myself for pinning down the other group for the failure of the movement. Can we deny the fact that it is always impossible to fight an insensitive administration with our age-old, well-established and democratically acceptable methods. The use of stings with electronic devices that initially helped common people to collect evidences to help them in raising voices against the incidences of oppressions are now being utilized by the administration to browbeat voices of discontent. All DUTA meetings/dharnas/speaches are invariably captured on camera these days to put it at our disadvantage. The administration has already started liberal use of these devices to establish our presence and absence in such DUTA gatherings and they have also resorted to threatening the teachers of using other attendance recording devices (biometric) to enforce their repressive designs. To add to our wounds there are some of us who want us to realize that we can survive only at the mercy of those who are close to the administration. The claim by some group of teachers that they would not have “allowed” a salary cut or would have successfully stopped other such regressive measures by the administration only reinforces the fear among common teachers. After facing a few salary cuts, common teachers now know that they are not only helpless but not even in a position to bargain. It is easier to blame a group for our collective failure but we all know from deep inside our hearts that a road ahead will be visible only when we collectively decide to wake up now.

Exploring a way

It would be better for us if we can realize that the days are gone when we could make the authority feel our collective pressure. In fact one of the prerequisites to make them feel our pressure is that the administration should be sensitive enough to respond to pressures. All democratically acceptable measures of movements and agitations are bound to fail as soon as an administration decides to become completely insensitive. The strength is always collective but what goes into our clear disadvantage is that in this new technologically advanced world the administration can always find a way to single you out. Now even mob has a face on a camera. Besides this, with the increase in salaries and perks as well as the ever growing EMI culture, the stakes have become so high that these factors are actually helping the administration in singling out each one of us.

Is there a way out or we will have to leave everything to our destiny? I can see a ray of light. The AAP experiment, irrespective of our agreement on its ultimate success or failure, has taught us some very precious lessons. The AAP success-story in Delhi was surprisingly without their indulgence into any kind of violence or their participation in any visible law-breaking movement. On the other hand, the survival of individuals like Subramaniam Swamy in the political horizon of India can also provide us with a clue to move ahead.

Possible strategy

The lesson is clear and loud - we will have to depend on the social media and the legal system to deliver in favour of teachers. Can't we think of creating a legal cell to assist teachers in achieving our goals but entirely in a legally acceptable manner? 8000 strong strength of teachers can contribute more than 1 crore a month (average of Rs. 1200 per teacher or just 2% of our salaries) and that can be used to fight for our rights. This amount of money would be good enough to engage a battery of legal advisers to help us out with their invaluable advises, they can also be used to serve legal notices and finally to help us in filing a petition and fighting a case in a court. The “Social Media” can further help DUTA in identifying the cases that should be taken up by its legal cell. Of course, for this, an educated group like us teachers can be expected to adopt the social media in a big way. Any issue would then be decided in a lesser time with even wider consultation than now and it can come with unquestionable reliability. After all even during the British colonial rule we were never averse to take up a legal route and we have now seen how Kirori Mal teachers succeeded in the CPF/GPF case that DUTA could never clinched through the traditional pressure tactics spanning over many leaderships over more than a decade. I recall that we were muted when at the time of semesterisation the court itself had asked as as to why we did not move the court when so many rules were being blatantly violated for imposing semesterisation. We could have certainly won a case against our salary cut for taking a casual leave.