: The Delhi University Teachers’ Association (DUTA) has criticised Finance Minister Arun Jaitley’s Union Budget by calling it a “backdoor implementation of the discredited Draft National Education Policy”.
“The proposal to grant autonomous status to colleges identified on the basis of accreditation and ranking is to incentivise commercialisation in the form of self-financing,” it said in a statement.
‘Social exclusion’
The association further said that the commercialisation of public institutions along with greater reliance on privatisation would lead to social exclusion and decline of educational standards.
It felt that the government was trying to peddle the idea that the quality of education would only improve by letting educational structures be determined by market forces. “It is neither interested in addressing the real issues that ail education, specifically higher education, nor sensitive to the in-equalising effect of such a move,” the statement read.
DUTA felt universities and colleges across the country were already suffering due to inadequate infrastructure and abysmal teacher-student ratios.
It said Delhi University colleges were already finding it impossible to offer CBSC since the UGC refused to sanction adequate number of teaching posts, but the Finance Minister did not address that problem.
