HRD Ministry trying to saffronize education, alleged Congress

The Delhi Pradesh Congress Committee said the Union Human Resource Development Ministry was trying to saffronize education by the forceful implementation of the Choice Based Credit System and the Common University Act without taking the teaching and student communities into confidence.

Former Delhi Education Minister Prof Kiran Walia, Shadow Department member Smt. Ragini Nayak, said higher education is being reduced to the level of school education, and the implementation of the CBSC-CUA was a deliberate attempt by the BJP-led Central Government to privatize not only the colleges of Delhi, but also other Central University colleges.

They said under the CBSC system, the University Grants Commission frames 80 per cent of the syllabus, whereas the job of the UGC was to give grants to universities, while only 20 per cent of the syllabus would be decided by the universities. They said 52 colleges in Delhi have passed resolutions to reject the CBSC system, and 26 out of 23 elected representatives of Delhi University have also rejected the system. They said this system was totally undemocratic, and it was not put on the public domain before being implemented.

Prof Kiran Walia said the CBCS has rendered hundreds of ad hoc teachers of Delhi jobless in this new academic session, and workload of the teachers will be reduced drastically with the number of papers taught getting reduced from 24 to 14. She said this will reduce the requirements of teachers and hence, induce massive cuts in their jobs. She said on the one hand, the Central Government has made a reduction of Rs 14088.59 crore in the budget for education, and on the other hand, the budget for higher education has been slashed to put it at Rs 1479 crore, as these budgetary cuts imply that the Central Government wants to end the subsidy given to education.

Smt. Kiran Walia said nowhere in the world, University syllabus are alike, as each university has its own specialty, like the Delhi School of Economics, the Jawaharlal Nehru University and the Jamia Millia Islamia University in Delhi. She said if all these universities implemented same kind of syllabus, the specialties of these universities would cease. She said the BJP was trying to fulfill the RSS agenda of one faith, one language one culture in the country.