Jawaharlal National University (JNU) reduced the seats available under M.Phil and PhD courses for the upcoming academic session. Students have protested the decision made by officials of JNU to reduce the intake for mentioned programmes.
As announced by the university’s evaluation branch, 232 seats are reduced for School of Social Sciences (SSS), 141 seats are reduced for School of International Studies (SIS) and 73 seats are reduced for School of Language, Literature and Culture Studies. At present the strength of SSS is 330 students, SIS is 222 and School of Language, Literature and Culture Studies is 237.
Centre for African Studies, Centre for East African Studies, Centre for Indo-Pacific Studies, Centre for the Study of Discrimination and Exclusion, and Centre for Media Studies will not have any admission this year for the above mentioned two programmes.
JNU departments which have reduced the seats:
Centre for European Studies (6)
Centre for Inner Asian Studies (13)
Centre for International Legal Studies (7)
Centre for International Politics, Organization and Disarmament (37)
Centre for West Asian Studies (11)
Centre for Russian and Central Asian Studies (35)
Centre for Arabic Studies (24)
Centre for English Studies (13)
Centre for Indian Languages (49)
University claims that the new student intake announced is within the prescribed norms, but the students allege that the university has not taken permission from the statutory bodies.
Finally, the university announced that they are going to close the admissions for the programmes M.Phil and PhD. Pratim Ghoshal, who is a JNU student and member of Democratic Students Forum (DSF) said that University has released the number of intake for the upcoming admissions, which violated the intake approved by Academic Council as well as court orders.
A senior official from the university said that the calculations of reducing the number of seats have been done very carefully done by the evaluation department and done within the prescribed norms