Thanks to FYUP – Left is growing in DU while it is way out from India

Let me hold nothing back and admit here that due to inept handling of the FYUP implementation, the congress have reasonably lost its ground to the Left in Delhi University. It only made it worse as they also showed signs of engaging themselves in narrow caste considerations to help their failed cause. I must not shy away from what has been in a visible public domain that the right wing teachers' and students' fronts NDTF and ABVP, who were earlier hoping the Center to corner Left with their hammer of FYUP could not remain mute spectator when they witnessed them hammering even common stakeholders hard. I have nothing to prove in this connection as the alarming rise in the share of votes in favor of the Left both in the students as well as teachers elections left little room for us to analyze. It was only in the nick of the time that right wing took up the cause of common stakeholders to keep their relevance alive in DU.

The major drawbacks of FYUP that those opposing FYUP utilizes are

1. the fact that the students were required to pay for an additional year and invest an additional one-third of their time for getting the same degree was enough to create repulsion among students
2. that the DU was complete unprepared to handle the task and the University along with the college administration kept on failing to preempt logistic problems that started coming up on each fresh day after the implementation. They were further exposed hollow in handling in these problems as they started building up an army of DU officials mainly on narrow considerations.
3. that while seniors were slow and sometimes afraid of adapting to modern teaching tools, they were expected not only to learn these but become a master of these in no time.
4. that Foundation Courses were introduced without enough study materials and helpless teachers were asked to engage 'classrooms' in a manner that they were never used to - only helped the discontentment to grow.
   Even though I would not shy away from admitting my admiration for some aspects of this exercise, I would sum this up as a clear case of giving an years' dose of drugs to a TB patient in a single day. And we are left with an impossible looking task of saving the patient. Believe me, we were never required to sow the seeds of dissatisfaction among the stakeholders, we had only a task left to show our concern to the cause. Without even discussing the merits of this arguably ill-conceived but surely ill-timed reform I can say for sure that the primary mistake that the authority made was that before they themselves analyzed and got prepared for the new challenges they decided to handle them as they would encounter them during the process of implementation. This overconfidence that later resulted in an ego problem made it worse as they were left with no option but to look for narrow identity considerations to somehow make this effort appear as success.
   I am at a loss of words as I am not sure now whether one should prescribe a rollback or just a sincere review of FYUP that would not only address all major concerns of common stakeholders as listed above by me but more importantly keep us open for any fresh and sensible reforms.