The recent notification released by University Grants Commission has redefined the “Direct-teaching hours” by excluding tutorials from its scope and counting two hours of practical as equivalent to one hour of lecture.  In addition to this, several changes are introduced to make promotion of university teachers a distant dream, thereby, making teaching profession unattractive for talent.

Why do we want complete rollback of this draconian notification?

----The new notification snatches away the livelihood opportunity from 5000 adhoc teachers in Delhi University alone (which is about 50% of the total teaching work force).  At an all-India level, the scale of unemployment is mammoth i.e., about 1.5 lakh ad hoc teachers have become unemployed in Central-universities. These teachers are being gravely punished for having seen a dream of entering into this noble profession by dedicating almost half a decade of their lives for pursuing M.Phils or PhDs.

---- We all regularly fulminate against the poor global rankings of Indian universities. One of the key indicator of such rankings is the teacher-student ratio which currently is 1:20 in Delhi university but with the implementation of this new notification, this ratio is expected to become 1:40 (Global average teacher-student ratio of 800 universities in the World University Rankings 2016 is 1:16.5). There will be no surprises here if it results into even poorer global rankings of Indian universities in the near future.

----This notification makes Academic Performance Indicator (a key criteria to promote teachers) more harsh and therefore, denying promotion to thousands of university teachers.

----The ratio of tutorials to lectures is being drastically reduced in this new notification. This will deny students the opportunity to enrich learning through small group interaction and restrict student-teacher interaction to lecturing large classrooms, thereby, adversely affecting the quality of education.

----Another indispensable aspect of this notification is its brutal impact on the scope of academic research. Increased workload of teachers by amending the definition of “direct teaching hours” would cast its shadow over the research output of Central  Universities by not leaving any time for teachers to pursue a genuine and quality research. Can we afford to let our academic research degrade further with a concomitant aspiration to be the fastest growing economy in the world.