 "UGC")
The University Grants Commission’s (UGC’s) decision to discontinue the non-NET (National Eligibility Test) fellowships for MPhil/PhD students from next academic year has caused a stir among the affected students, who have been protesting outside its headquarters in Delhi for about 10 days now. The decision, taken at UGC’s 510th meeting on October 7 and communicated on its website two weeks later, did not specify any reason, but it was reported that a resource crunch could have led to such a move.
Subsequently, MHRD had issued a press statement on October 25, saying the government would establish a “review committee to go into the issues related to the research fellowships provided by UGC, covering both NET and non-NET fellowships”. It had sought to assure students that the existing fellowships would continue, and had set a year-end deadline for the committee to give its report.
However, a close look at UGC’s funding pattern in recent years suggests a resource crunch might not have been the cause. While Plan allocation to UGC in the Union Budget for 2015-16 has remained unchanged from last year at Rs 3,520 crore, its total allocation (Plan and non-Plan) has, in fact, increased to Rs 9,615.45 crore from Rs 8,977.71 crore for 2014-15.
The general development grant provided by UGC – for merged schemes and non-NET fellowships – is unavailable for 2014-15, as the Commission is yet to publish its annual report for the year.
“The amount spent on non-NET fellowships is very small. These fellowships come under the Plan grants; only salaries for teachers and other staff fall under non-Plan,” explains former UGC member M M Ansari. “Besides, even if there was a reduction in funding, that should not have led to a scrapping. The payments earlier made by UGC under the Rashtriya Uchchatar Shiksha Abhiyan have now been taken over by the ministry of human resource development (MHRD). So, there is a decline in UGC’s expenditure. The decision is irrational.”
Kanhaiya Kumar, president of Jawaharlal Nehru University Students Union, gives an indication of UGC’s outgo. “During its meeting with a students’ delegation on October 26, UGC had given an estimate of Rs 92 crore as its outlay for non-NET fellowships last year,” he says.
Jawaharlal Nehru University Teachers Association (JUNTA) President Sachidanand Sinha’s estimate of UGC’s expenditure on such fellowships comes close to Kumar’s. “The outgo on fellowships is only around Rs 100 crore a year,” Sinha says.
Ansari sees the scrapping decision as a rushed one. “This is not a well-thought-out call. In fact, (HRD) Minister Smriti Irani recently launched a flagship programme for girls pursuing PhD under the Swami Vivekananda Single Girl Child Scholarships for research in social sciences. The scrapping will affect that programme, too,” Ansari adds.
Earlier, media reports had also suggested that UGC might have scrapped the fellowships because of an apparent “misuse of non-NET fellowship funds”. But Sinha disagrees: “UGC has no data on this. It has no substantive reason to say non-NET fellowships are misused. It is not a direct transfer. It is granted through the supervisor, the department, and the university. There are three stages of checks.”
12th Plan commitment
Psephologist, academic and co-founder of Swaraj Abhiyan Yogendra Yadav suggests UGC’s decision is not only irrational but contrary to its own commitment. “In its position paper on the 12th Five-Year Plan (2012-17), UGC had committed itself to extending the range and number of fellowships, besides increasing and annually revising the amounts provided. And, UGC had officially acknowledged India’s higher education was seriously short of student-aid programmes.”
On how to approach the goal of “equality of opportunity in higher education”, UGC’s position paper had said: “Support measures, such as fellowship and tuition waivers, need to be expanded to cover the full range of higher education. Currently, our scholarship schemes have many flaws: They serve a tiny proportion of students. The amount of scholarship is a small fraction of a student’s costs. There are very few scholarships for undergraduate and post-graduate studies; there are just too many schemes with small numbers of fellowships. Scholarship continues to be the principal mode of student support.”
Regarding UGC’s steps on fellowships, Yadav says: “There was a special meeting of UGC in 2012 on what should be done. One of the big plans for the 12th Plan was upscaling student-aid programmes. Quantitative targets were fixed to give student aid to at least one per cent of undergraduates and five per cent of postgraduates.”
He adds: “It was agreed the fellowship programmes needed to be enhanced, and a committee was constituted. I chaired it. Before it could complete its work, I was unceremoniously removed and the committee stopped functioning. Here is an institution that says we need to extend and go forward, but we actually go back.”
On the poor coverage of fellowships, Yadav says, “At the PhD level, there were an estimated 120,000 students two years ago; UGC gave only about 24,000 fellowships. At the post-graduate level, it gave 5,000 fellowships for a student base of 3.3 million. For undergraduates, the number was zero for 26 million students.”
