By Sushmita panda
Things are getting worse between the Delhi university teacher’s association (DUTA) and the University authorities. The protest against the 4th may 2016 UGC notification seems to get intense day by day. According to this notification, there will be an increase in weekly teaching hours of assistant professors from 16 hours to 22 hours and of associate professors 14 hours to 20 hours! The tutorial classes for humanities and social sciences will be devalued. The 2 hours of practical class in science courses will count as just 1 hour of lecture class and there will also be an imposition of API for faculty in career promotion. This will result in 50% increase in workload for permanent teachers for example, for a particular course such as economics honours there are total 60 lectures to complete the course but due to this guideline the same course will take only 50 hours. Consequently, there will be massive expulsion of Ad-hoc teachers. The second for this protest is the deterioration of the quality of teaching. A teacher normally invests 4-5 hours to prepare for a 1 hour lecture. But due to increase in teaching time, the teacher will have to invest more time leading to lack of quality teaching. The teaching-learning process will degrade due to worsened teacher –student ratio. The application programing interference (API) will downgrade teaching / supervision and promote commercialized research and publication. According to sources UGC notification is the direct outcome of 55% budget cut for UGC from Rs.9315.45 crore in 2015-16 to Rs.4286.94crore in 2016-17 union budget. In order to fulfill their demands the DUTA boycotted the evaluation of the recent semester examination and after today’s GBM it is decided to continue it till June 2, 2016.The All India Students Association (AISA) is playing a significant role in this protest. “This protest is not only about the livelihood issues of the teachers but at the end of the day it will in some way or the other will hamper the education of the university students which will lead to serious academic problems in future “said Pritish Menon an (AISA Delhi State Vice president). He added,” after todays GBM the DUTA decided to continue their protest to pressurize the authorities to scrap the API.