We are now in the second week of September and Delhi University is still to finish with the admissions for the academic session 2023-24. The Delhi University (DU) last week announced that second spot admission rounds for undergraduate (UG) and BTech programmes for the 2023 academic session would now take place. At the earliest, it would be another week before this round is completed. The completion of the round is no guarantee that all the seats will be filled.
Though DU never announced it officially, last year it had 6,000 seats vacant in the UG programmes. In percentage terms, almost 10 % of the seats allocated to DU remained vacant. Where are the students going? Obviously to private universities in Delhi NCR? The other govt universities offering UG programme, Guru Govind Singh Indraprastha University and Ambedkar University, complement DU with their equally laggard admission process. This is surprising as the results of the qualifying examinations came out in June and we are now into September, three months but the end of the process is nowhere in sight. On the other hand, the private universities in Delhi-NCR completed their admission process and have started their session too.
Why is this happening? If we were to believe the conspiracy theorists, the delay in the admission process is on purpose as the students lose patience and take admission in a private university. The private universities on the other hand let loose their telecallers, hammering the students and parents that in their wait for admission to a government university, they may even miss the opportunity to study in a private university.
This creates a terrible situation for the students who find themselves caught between the devil and the deep sea and decide to go by the advice of a polite tele caller and grab a seat in a private university. Lest an eyebrow be raised, let it be very clear that the column writer has nothing against private education institutions.
The grouses about the lack of students on the govt university campus lead to underutilisation of public resources. While private universities use all kinds of promotion tools to fill seats, the leadership of the government universities seems to care two figs about it.
This is largely on account of their salaries not being dependent on student fees but on the UGC’s liberal grants. Let’s take the example of DU alone; going by last year’s estimates and this year’s trends, similar vacancy is going to remain.
If there are 6,000 seats vacant, it would add up to at least 120 vacant classrooms. According to conservative estimates, each class is served by 8 teachers. If multiplied by 120, it would mean about 1,000 teachers remaining on the rolls of the university without any workload. The self-financing institutions, on the other hand, count on their vacant seats and try and find remedial measures to meet the financial losses to which the untaken seats would accrue.
However, nobody seems to really care about the loss to the national exchequer, not at least the academic leadership of DU. When the university is unable to get seats filled in its core areas, what point starting B Tech and five-year-integrated LLB programmes, which do have not many takers that’s not very surprising too.
DU in the current times is remaining in the news for the reasons of hosting political events as official functions. The whole centenary years elapsed but they could not come out with one worthwhile research project or legacy structure. It’s better to repair the old time-tested system than retrofit and call it new. A retrofitted vehicle is never known to take a long journey.
Sidharth Mishra
Author and president, Centre for Reforms, Development & Justice