New Delhi: An open letter has been written by 33 opposition Members of Parliament to Union Minister of Human Resource Development Prakash Javadekar, alleging Jawaharlal Nehru University was violating the reservation policy in 2018-19 MPhil, MPhil/PhD admissions.
This comes after the JNU Students’ Union petitioned the Lok Sabha to intervene and “restore” the benefits awarded to students belonging to Schedule Castes, Schedule Tribes and Other Backward Castes in the university.
Similarly, in the letter, the MPs said that “removal of the reservation policy for the SC/ST/OBC and PWD in JNU is evident from the clauses” imposed in the university’s admission this year.
The clauses mentioned in the letter are:
Clause 3.1: The candidates for admission to MPhil/PhD and PhD are invited for written examination and candidates qualifying with 50% marks in the written examination shall be called for viva exam.
Clause 3.2: To be eligible for being invited for viva voce exam, a candidate must secure 50% marks to qualify. The weightage to written viva voce exams is gives as 100%.
Earlier, it was 70 marks for written test, 30 marks for viva. Combined marks of both would be considered for selection, besides properly fulfilling the reservation norms.
“These clauses show that candidates from all categories shall score a minimum of 50% marks in the written examination to qualify for the viva voce exam. This shows the viva voce is the sole criterion for selection process,” the letter said.
“The University constituted a committee in 2016 to study the discrimination in the admission process with special reference to viva voce. The committee submitted its report based on the data which recommended that the discriminatory pattern would get mitigated if the viva mark is reduced from 30 to 15 marks,” the letter added.
The letter said that by inserting these clauses, JNU had violated the Central Education Institution Reservation in Admissions Act, 2006. “The university has also violated the constitutional provision access to higher education by SC/STs in violation with Article 15 (1) and 15 (4) for the Constitution and Prevention of Atrocities Act, 1989,” the letter said.
The matter has also been raised by the former secretary PS Krishnan. He wrote to the secretary higher Education R Subrahmanyam saying that “reservation has been virtually flouted in M.Phil/Ph.D admissions in JNU”.
Krishnan proportion of these communities in admission have declined, saying that only 1.3% SC students took admission against 15% reservation, only 0.6% ST students against 7.5% reservation, and only 8.2% against 27% OBCs. “Similar neglect of the physically-disabled has been reported in media,” he added.
Krishnan has attributed this decline to the UGC’s notification of 2016 which lays down that candidates should qualify in a written examination with at least 50% mark to be considered for viva-voce.
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