Students’ organisations from the Left and Right parties do not want to leave no stone unturned in ensuring that the four-year undergraduate programme (FYUP) is scrapped. Therefore, they have continued their protests against it. They have also formulated a way to help save the first batch of FYUP students.
“Most non-Honours courses are sheer waste of time and energy. The burden of sub-standard foundation courses does not let us concentrate on courses of the main discipline. These unwanted courses and lack of infrastructure is forcing us to stay in college till 5 p.m. There are lots of things that are wrong with these courses. If acted upon now, the situation can still be salvaged without causing any harm to the first batch of FYUP students who took admission last year,” said Sunny Kumar from the All India Students’ Association. His organisation had collaborated with teachers from the university to bring out an alternative scheme of papers so that the first batch of FYUP students could still get their Honours degrees in three years.
The organisation said this scheme is feasible if no further time is wasted.
“If a student is allowed not to study the remaining four foundation courses, four Applied Courses, six cultural activity papers and four out of six Discipline II courses in the second and third year, we can get rid of 14 non-Honours courses. In these 14 slots one can easily study six Discipline One or major courses plus two research (main honours) papers, which are forced currently in the fourth year. Thus the current batch can finish their graduation with an Honours degree in May 2016,” added Sunny.
The Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, which has been carrying out intense protests all year long and even controls the Delhi University Students’ Union, is also taking no chances. It carried out a protest for several hours in front of the University Grants Commission on Friday.
However, what took the cake and surprised everyone from the teachers to students was the complete U-turn by the Congress-affiliated National Students’ Union of India. Allegations by the Delhi University Teachers’ Association that FYUP was the agenda of the then ruling Congress to bring in foreign investments were many. And, the NSUI was seen as the only organisation vociferously supporting FYUP and the Vice-Chancellor throughout the year.
It even lost the DUSU heavily due to this reason alone. That was why on Friday, everyone on campus was amused and taken aback when some of its members suddenly erected a tent outside the Arts Faculty and declared that it would go on hunger strike until FYUP was “revoked”.
