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#OccupyUGC: Students Force Smriti Irani To An Open Discussion

Press Release By #OccupyUGC

07 November, 2015
Countercurrents.org

Over 1000 students under the banner of '#OccupyUGC' marched to MHRD today on the 16th day of the occupation. The students marched to MHRD with the demands that the Non - Net fellowship should not be discontinued, fellowships should be extended to the state universities and no criteria - either on basis of merit or income - should be implemented and the fellowship should be given to each and every student of research.

The student's protest forced the HRD minister Smriti Irani to come out of the ministry premises and have a public discussion with the students on the issue in front of MHRD where the students were holding a public meeting. Smriti Irani has given assurance to students that the non net fellowship will not be discontinued, that it would be extended to state universities, that the amount of scholarship will be increased and there would be direct cash transfers into student's accounts. However, on the issue of implementation of a criteria in providing the fellowship the HRD minister maintained that a criteria mechanism is going to be implemented in all probability.

Even though the Ministry has not given any of these promises in written, the Occupy UGC movement appreciates that after 15 days of constant struggle the Ministry has finally been forced to take cognizance of this issue.

We are however not overtly optimistic and are vary of how the Ministry will implement its promises as many loopholes are still visible. For example, when the MHRD minister says that the MHRD would not discontinue the fellowship and yet in next statement asserts that a criteria will be implemented to decide who all will receive this fellowship we clearly see that the government is not going to provide the fellowship to everyone and is definitely going to discontinue the fellowship for a good number of students! This completely exposes the fallacy in the promise that the fellowship will not be discontinued.

We see that the main agenda of the review committee which the Ministry has appointed is to design a criteria along which it will find new ways of excluding students in basis of an economic or merit criteria. The movement also sees these measures of fund cuts, fee hikes etc as being part of the larger agenda of the government to radically privatize the education sector, especially in view of the WTO-GATS conference that is going to be held in Kenya in the coming month. Public education is going to be compromised and sold off as a tradeable service in the WTO. The students of Occupy UGC have decided not to fall into this trap of words and will continue the movement till our demands are met in real. The movement has also begun to raise larger and more crucial questions of privatization of education and will continue to raise these questions in the days to come.

 



 

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