Recent developments from the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi indicate bad news for the varsity in terms of its financial standing.
The prospectus for the MA Hindi Translation course showed zero seats across all categories, which sources from the School of Indian Languages (whose faculty conducts the course), as well as a report by The Telegraph, attribute to a lack of adequate faculty.
In July this year, Prof Santishree Dhulipudi Pandit, Vice-Chancellor of the university told The New Indian Express that the administration was considering leasing two properties on the campus, namely the Gomti Guest House and 35 Feroze Shah Road for development, under the Public-Private-Partnership (PPP) model for extra revenue.
These, and other developments, beg the question — is JNU facing a funding crisis?
Persistent underfunding of JNU, allege students and teachers
It is worth noting that academics, teachers and students of JNU have long been alleging a gradual reduction in funds over the last decade.
This is especially evident in the reduction of academic expenditure of the varsity, which dropped from Rs 37.34 crore in 2014-15 to Rs 20.30 crore in 2023-24, as reported by the National Herald.
In its report titled JNU: The State of the University released in August 2024, the JNU Teachers’ Association (JNUTA) illustrates the activities most affected by these cuts since the 2015-16 academic year as follows:
Further, in 2020, it was reported by Scroll that while academic expenditure had declined in the previous years, the university’s spending for legal expenses and security saw a significant increase.
“Students and scholars of JNU are struggling with their research and fieldwork due to this reduction. They are forced to pay for research material and academic journals from their own pockets,” explains Prof Moushumi Basu, President of JNUTA.
She adds that the decline in funding also affects other academic activities like seminars, workshops, laboratory operations and overall student welfare.
In a reply to an RTI query by former JNU Students' Union (JNUSU) President N Sai Balaji in 2019, it was revealed that the funds for the Advanced Instrumentation Research Facility (AIRF) were cut by 72 per cent. AIRF was considered to be one of the best interdisciplinary research facilities in the country, with 25 state-of-the-art research facilities and supporting equipment.
Before that, the JNUSU also accused the then VC Prof Mamidala Jagadesh Kumar of cutting the funds allocated to the campus library by 80 per cent in 2018, a claim the administration termed as false.
Students of the varsity say that scholarships and fellowships, and the campus infrastructure have been hit the worst due to this decline in funding.
“The university levies a Merit-cum-Means (MCM) scholarship to students from low-income families. However, the monthly scholarship amount has been stuck at Rs 2,000 for the last ten years,” says Dhananjay, President of JNUSU.
To recall, the JNUSU launched a 17-day hunger strike starting on August 11, 2024, and one of the demands is to increase the MCM scholarship from Rs 2,000 to Rs 5,000 per month, so that it also covers the mess fees of Rs 4,000. Student leaders from the union also protested against various fund cuts, which were induced by a loan of Rs 496 crore from the Higher Education Funding Agency (HEFA) in 2023, according to a report by NewsClick.
Furthermore, the scholarship issued to non-National Eligibility Test fellows, ie PhD scholars who are not the recipients of the Junior Research Fellowship (JRF), has been stagnant at Rs 10,000 per month in Sciences, and Rs 8,000 in Social Sciences and Arts for the last 10 years.
In an earlier meeting with the JNUSU regarding the installation of accessible infrastructure for persons with visual impairments in June this year, the VC revealed that the varsity has been running on a deficit of Rs 48 crore, according to a report by the Times of India.
“By announcing that she would give two properties on the campus to private entities for development and collect rent from them, the VC sounds less like an educator and more like a property broker,” Dhananjay says, adding that this would facilitate a “real estate mafia takeover” of the campus.
Prof Basu claims that the decision to lease the Gomti Guest House and 35 Feroze Shah Road was not communicated with the teacher’s body at large.
Dhananjay adds that the fund crunch, which he believes has been facilitated by Central Government policies, is also percolating to the infrastructure and daily life on the campus.
“The administration is refusing to open the Barak Hostel for students despite its construction being completed, as it is too expensive to maintain. Because of this, not only are students suffering due to lack of sufficient accommodation on the campus, but a fully constructed hostel building is getting ruined. Is it not an inefficient use of resources?” he further asks.
He also alleges that maintenance workers had not been paid their salaries for three months.
Step-motherly treatment from Centre?
Apart from underfunding, another problem that plagues the varsity is that even if the funds allocated to the varsity do increase, the increment is negligible and barely sufficient to cover its activities.
In an RTI response to activist Praful Sarda, the Central Government said that subsidies to JNU have increased from Rs 2,055 crores between 2004-05 and 2014-15 to Rs 3,030 crores between 2015-16 and 2023-24.
However, this figure is misleading, and does not reveal the full picture of the state of funding received by JNU from the Central Government, says Prof Basu.
“These figures do not take into account variables like inflation or changes in the currency value over the last few years,” she says. Moreover, she terms this increase as “negligible”, and says that this is less than what other central universities receive.
“Despite ranking among the top 10 in the NIRF (National Institutional Ranking Framework) Rankings, and being awarded a high accreditation by NAAC (National Assessment and Accreditation Council), the Central Government wouldn’t even name JNU as an Institute of Eminence, making it eligible for more funding,” she says.
Attesting to this, Dhananjay says that JNU has been a victim of the “hurt ego” of the Central Government, headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP), which the varsity is perceived as critical of.
“JNU runs on public funds. Every student at JNU is educated at the public’s expense. If we don’t speak for the public and raise their issues, there is no point in us studying in an institution like JNU,” he says, adding that the varsity has always been a critical voice against the government and its misdoings — irrespective of which party is in power.
Further, he alleges that universities and educational institutions seen as “apolitical” like the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), or having close ideological proximity with the BJP such as the Banaras Hindu University (BHU) receive more benefits, grants and funds from the Central Government.
Part of a systemic issue?
For the past ten years, academics and activists have been alleging that there has been a significant reduction in government spending on higher education.
According to a report by Scroll, the Central Government only allocated 0.44 per cent of the annual Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to education spending since 2014. In the Annual Budget for 2024, Higher Education was allocated Rs 47,619.77 crore, which is barely 1 per cent of the total budget, despite a 7 per cent increase from last year’s allocation.
The Centre for Financial Accountability, a think tank that monitors financial institutions and their impact on development and human rights, criticised this allocation, claiming that it was inadequate to improve infrastructure, faculty recruitment, and research capabilities, or bring meaningful growth to educational institutions.
Further, many from the academic community — students, scholars, and teachers alike — claim that recent policies from the Central Government have been bent towards privatising higher education in India.
According to them, this push is propelled by the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, which pushes for the “self-financing” of education institutions, and levies “graded autonomy” to HEIs, which promises them “the freedom and flexibility to innovate, adapt, and excel in education and research.”
However, most universities have not been receiving grants under the guise of this autonomy, and are forced to finance themselves through students’ fees. This, coupled with the replacement of grants with loans as the primary mode of funding through the HEFA, has led to many public universities and education institutions, such as Delhi University (DU) and the IITs in Delhi and Bombay cash-strapped and debt-ridden, reports Scroll.
Academics argue that this leads to fee hikes, dwindling infrastructure, and compromises in academic activities because of a crunch in funds — and makes room for privatisation.
In recent times, it has been observed that Delhi University attempted to move in this direction with its Envisage DU 2047 plan (released in July 2023), which envisioned a departure from government reliance on funding, and admitted that “financial support for higher education and research has been and will be cut.”
This plan came at a time when the university was rife with protests against fee hikes, substandard study material, and displacement of teachers.
While the administration of JNU maintained that the college fees cannot be hiked under any circumstance, one cannot help but wonder if the varsity is headed in a similar direction, thus, becoming a victim to the Central Government’s alleged plot to privatise, if it already didn’t.
