NEW DELHI: A bid by the Centre to end the Jawaharlal Nehru University stand-off concluded without a final resolution on Tuesday as the university administration did not agree to several suggestions by the Union Human Resources Development Ministry, this newspaper has learnt.
A large number of students in the campus have been agitating since end of October against the revised inter-hall administration manual--mainly substantial hike in utility and service charges for the hostel- and “high-handedness” of the varsity administration leading to near-complete shutdown of academic activities in most of the schools.
Officials in the HRD Ministry after holding several rounds of negotiations with office bearers of the JNU students’ union and varsity administration had asked the university to put the revised utility and services charges on hold and also allow students’ representation in the future academic council meetings that takes such decisions.
“The university administration has remained adamant on not going for a complete roll back of the hiked fee as proposed by us,” an official told this newspaper.
“It also did not commit to recognizing the present JNUSU which means that there will be trouble in future meetings too,” the official added.
“We have now asked both students and administrative officials to present their cases afresh on Wednesday. We are keen that the crisis ends at the earliest and normalcy is stored in the university.”
In the meeting, the HRD ministry official also said that it will ask the deans of schools in the university to defer the semester examinations by three weeks-scheduled to begin on Thursday.
The JNUSU office bearers who were present in the meeting, however, insisted that the government should direct the university to reschedule the examinations in favour of students as there have been no classes in the campus for last several weeks.
Centre not to pass any directive to JNU admin
The HRD Ministry is unlikely to pass any directive to JNU as it is an autonomous institution, but may only “facilitate” a resolution. Last week, it asked a panel to compare JNU hostel fee, after the second rollback, with other central universities