 Hello and welcome to NewsClick. Today we have with us Professor Nandita Narayan, former Fedcuda and Duda President and currently teaching in St. Seaton's College and we also have with us Professor Shaukat Ghosh who is an academic council member and is teaching English in Delhi University. So we're going to be discussing about the concept of autonomy in colleges and its impact on our current education system. If you could tell us what is this autonomy that we have in colleges and why are the teachers opposing it so much? See I mean the word by itself has a very very positive connotation in the sense that autonomy means freedom but in the context of higher education that we are looking at right now this freedom translates into freedom from regulation and freedom from regulation for those institutions that have been funded and administered publicly. So in the sense that these are public funded institutions with an accountability towards the public and how is that accountability enforced on these institutions, on the management of these institutions through a set of regulations which insist on certain standards of quality, certain standards of inclusivity as far as students are concerned. So you have to keep the fees reasonably low in order to ensure that students from different kind of social and economic splatter are included and of course reservation policy and so on and so forth. Now the moment we say that okay the government is now looking at a scenario wherein it is trying to give these institutions an autonomy from these regulations it really means that these institutions will no longer be asked to be publicly accountable as we have seen in private institutions which have always enjoyed a greater degree of autonomy compared to public funded institutions in India. Private institutions charge a kind of fees that is not affordable by most people. So most people, I mean India is after all let's face it of poor country and therefore most people are excluded from higher education and that is exactly going to be replicated in this scenario. The important thing is autonomy for whom. So the way in which this proposal has been envisaged and placed before us, it's clear that the autonomy will be for the management not for the academic component that is the teachers. In fact whatever degree of autonomy teachers in terms of making syllabi in terms of you know engaging with students all of that is concerned is guaranteed by the fact that there are certain sets of regulations governing a university within which you have those freedoms. Your service conditions are also such that the democratic spaces to some extent which have been fought for over you know period of time and won those are guaranteed to a certain extent. So the academic autonomy of teachers is likely to suffer very you know badly under this. The second thing is that it's very clear that the autonomy is for self-financing courses and what the UTC makes very clear is that you can start any courses you want to. You can charge any fees you want to. We will not give you any money for these courses or infrastructure or teachers or anything which are in addition to what is already there. Now they are saying that okay whatever courses were existing we will continue funding those but it's not very clear whether they will continue funding them at the existing level whether they will appoint new teachers because 50% of our teachers are now ad hoc we have got vacancies will they fill them up on permanent basis allow us to fill it up they finance it. All these questions are there and they're not answered at all. The way in which they are steamrolling it through management they're directly contacting chairpersons they're bulldozing it through like in St. Stephen's College we got a notice for the governing body meeting two days before the governing body meeting was held and the agenda was this most important thing that will be you know application for autonomous status and we pleaded and students also pleaded you know they represented they had big demonstrations pleaded that please give us time to discuss it no time was given for any discussion they were completely ignored their petitions were ignored protests were ignored the major academic stakeholder in this whole system are A the students and B the teachers I mean employees also but these are the people who have not been consulted they're bypassed completely as if they're inconsequential in this whole affair. So this Divesh Singh the DU Dean of Colleges Sinha sorry has said that this move will give more administrative and academic freedom to the colleges so how true is that like what do we with what authority is he saying. See I mean we are responding not to an individual statement individuals can always fudge official policy but the official policy as is reflected in the UGC draft regulations. Okay now the matter of whether the autonomy as a concept has always been enshrined in higher education policy right from the start of an independent policy making by an independent government but this new sort of push towards autonomy which actually is bringing private public institutions very close to the way in which private institutions are managed there should be a greater debate there should be a debate at a parliamentary level in terms of the national education policy and whatever the government is envisaging but nothing of that sort has been done and instead of trying to create legislations because the government knows that it cannot enter into a debate there is going to be informed opposition against it so the government is trying to as Nandita said steamroll it through UGC regulations which become binding without any kind of debate. The other thing is that autonomy of the university is something we've been fighting for from the very beginning and to a certain extent it was guaranteed to us that it's only the university's autonomy from interference in matters of academic you know importance would guarantee that the certain quality would remain that there will be freedom of expression which is extremely important for any kind of quality and you have the right to you know take decisions in matters of syllabi examination system and so on. Now on one hand the government has been eroding not just eroding it is completely destroying the autonomy of the universities today the universities do not have the right to decide about what exam system suits them we were forced to adopt the semester system which has been absolutely disastrous from the point of view of teaching and learning under CBCS our right to make syllabi has been taken away today we are teaching out of teaching syllabi which are very poorly framed which have been thrust on us by the UGC without any transparent mechanism about who is it who made these syllabi all our committees of courses and academic council and executive council have been bulldozed into accepting those syllabi and teaching out of those syllabi so you know our academic autonomy has already been under severe erosion and pressure and on the other hand they say we'll give autonomy to the colleges which are constituents colleges you see one of the great advantages of being a constituent college of a large university is that we get the expertise from the best minds across the university in the framing of syllabi in the you know running of the whole system in the making of question papers so we have the infrastructure of the university both academic as well as the other physical infrastructure the exam system and so on to fall back on each college by itself is a very small unit it's not a viable unit you have one teacher teaching one specialization tomorrow that teacher is on leave or is ill we don't have anybody for that specialization whereas in the university you have a large pool of talent so you know academically also we are not it's not viable for us to stand alone