NEW DELHI: Students’ Federation of India (SFI) along with other organisations on Monday registered a protest at the UGC against the recently released draft to de-reserve posts in SC/ST/OBC categories in favour of general seats in higher educational institutions.
The proposed draft by UGC, de-reservation of reserved vacancies in certain circumstances, particularly in cases of direct recruitment and promotion, potentially weakens this objective, the SFI president Aishe Ghosh said.
According to the draft, the executive council of the university has the authority to de-reserve Group C and D positions internally, whereas for Group A positions, the proposal has to be forwarded to the Ministry of Education for consideration.
“Leaving de-reservation decisions to various bodies (University Council, Ministry of Education) introduces the risk of subjectivity and potential bias. Amongst the 45 Central Universities we observe that only 14% professors belong to the above mentioned categories. The remaining are from the General category.”
SFI Delhi state committee member Aditi Tyagi said the students’ body met the officials of the UGC. “The UGC has accepted the grave mistake it committed by bringing out such discriminatory clause. The delegation was told that this clause will be removed from the revised draft,” she said.
Reacting to the draft, the Vice-Chancellor of the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) Santishree Dhulipudi Pandit shared on Sunday stating, “As VC JNU I want to reiterate to all stakeholders that no posts in JNU have been dereserved. We have got very good candidates under the reserved category.
In the 54-year-old history of JNU the highest number of reserved category faculty have been recruited during my tenure as VC and we are proud of implementing the Constitutional guarantees under the Reservation policy as stipulated by MOE, GOI.”
