The new draft of the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) university's Inter-Hall Administration (IHA) - the rule book that students in the hostel have to abide by - has proposed that students have to be back by 11 pm and have to be appropriately dressed. It also suggests a move to hike JNU's hostel fees by 75 times.
While many universities and colleges across the country are doing away with the regressive and discriminatory curfew system and rules, the new draft suggests that the JNU administration is all set to take a few steps backwards. The new draft says that the students have to be back to their hostels by 11 pm or an hour after the library closes and have to be 'appropriately dressed'. "They do not mention what appropriately dressed here means. Many things in the draft aren't quite clear," says Aishe Ghosh, a president of the JNU Students' Union. "Many reading rooms in the university are open 24*7. If this gets implemented, the hostel residents will not get to access these rooms too," she adds.
While the students were to pay Rs 240 per year for a single room, the current proposal is to collect Rs 1500 per month from each student. If the proposal gets implemented, every resident will have to pay Rs 1300 more every month and will shoot up their yearly expenditure by Rs 17760.
However, this is not the only hike that the draft proposes. While the security deposit is proposed to be hiked from Rs 50 to Rs 5,000, the admission fee, which is currently Rs 5, may be increased by 100 times, to Rs 500. On top of this, talks are going on to install water and electricity meters in the hostel rooms and the students will have to pay these bills too.
"The draft is a direct attack against the very idea of a public university and affordable education which we have in JNU," says Aishe Ghosh. She also says that the student representative of the IHA was not part of the committee that drafted the proposal. "We will resist the draft at any cost. The committee is open to suggestions until October 18. So, the JNUSU and hostel committees will together make a set of suggestions in favour of the students and submit them," she says.
The university's IHA Assistant Registrar Sajjan Singh has issued a notice that says that the hostel manual was last updated on June 2005 and a few consequent updating of rules have made many provisions obsolete. He says that this was the reason for constituting a committee to update the rules.
