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.

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.