While students of the Delhi University fight a legal battle against the proposed online Open Book Examination, the Joint Forum for Movement on Education (JFME) has initiated a signature campaign on change.org to send a petition to the Prime Minister Narendra Modi urging him to immediately withdraw the UGC guidelines to mandatorily conduct exams for final year students and go with an alternative evaluation process.
The JFME which is a consolidated body of teachers formed in 2017, has the support of the Delhi University Teachers' Association (DUTA) among other organisations and is chaired by DUTA's ex-President, Dr Nandita Narain. The organisation has protests planned for the next week as well — both offline and online, said Dr Narain. "We have been urging the government to reconsider and think about the future of the students since they had brought out these guidelines. At one point, during the pandemic, it seemed like the UGC will cancel exams and everyone was asking why the DU Vice-Chancellor was hell-bent on conducting exams. But it turned out that both were being controlled by bigger players," said Dr Narain and added, "We are still hopeful that the issues, the stress of the students will be conveyed to the people who banged thalis and that would probably put some pressure on the government. There is no sense in conducting exams like this. Also this is not a final exam. It's just another emd-semester exam which can be evaluated otherwise. This is just delaying the procedure and the students are the ones being affected the most. They will lose an entire year," she added.
But the 'assault on public education' is not something this government has started, said Dr Narain. "The UPA had started the process but this government has taken it up more vigorously and they are more vicious as well. The players are the same. Only the puppets change," she added.
