Let us Unite to Reclaim DUTA for Teachers and Defend Public Higher Education

The DTF today announced its panel of candidates for the Delhi University Teachers Association (DUTA) elections scheduled for 4th September 2025. Leading the DTF team is Rajib Ray for President, alongside a dedicated team for the DUTA Executive Committee: Biswajit Mohanty, Dinesh Kataria, V.S. Dixit and Yasha Yadav.

The DTF is making an effort to bring together all teachers’ organisations and activists, who are concerned about the unwillingness of the pro-government NDTF leadership of the DUTA to confront the devastating changes in educational structures, content, and teachers’ service and working conditions. A united front with Rajib Ray as the candidate is the need of the hour.

Teachers in Delhi University are currently threatened by the policy directions of the NEP and its rolling out through various Regulations, Guidelines and SOPs. DUTA’s historic strength lay in its ability to unite teachers for collective struggles at the university and all-India levels through informed critiques of policies that compromise educational quality, public character, and teachers’ service and working conditions, often gaining public support to compel government policy reversals.

For several years, that ability has been severely compromised. The DUTA has been reduced to a pocket organisation serving the DU administration and the Union government, neglecting its mandate to fight for teachers’ rights and academic integrity. It cannot displease the authorities, acting instead as a lower-order power centre over teachers, not their collective instrument for struggle, gradually turning them voiceless and vulnerable.

An 11 July 2025 High Court Order

A High Court order, citing a recent landmark Supreme Court judgment in December 2024 called Jaggo, has directed regularisation of two ad-hoc teachers in the Department of GRS. This order demands an immediate collective response to secure its full implementation, including:

Regularisation of all continuing ad-hoc and temporary teachers.
Regularisation of teachers displaced against vacant posts.
Counting of all past service towards full-service benefits.
Regularisation of all non-teaching employees working as contractual employees.

The current leadership has failed on several counts:

Silence on corporatisation

Under the direction of the government, the University has adopted, in sync, a Strategic Plan (2024–47) and an IDP incorporating steps towards gradually freeing the university from public funding and reorienting itself academically to depend on funding from the market. Reduction in funding has already turned the university towards the predatory Higher Education Financing Agency (HEFA) loan model. Fees are being hiked and slated to be hiked annually. These have not been responded to with any visible agitation or substantive critique. This NEP-envisioned conversion of educational institutions into competing market players has serious consequences for teachers too.

Silence on detrimental UGC Draft Regulations and Guidelines

The Draft UGC Regulations and Guidelines 2025 propose two crucial changes designed to advance NEP’s central focus of ’empowering every institution to secure its finances’, namely:

(1) Clauses 3.8–3.10 require ‘notable contributions‘ as a precondition for promotion, forcing each teacher to contribute to securing market funding, in addition to promoting IKS and online education.

(2) A daily workload of ‘not less than eight hours‘ is specified, leaving teachers at the mercy of an administration ’empowered’ to allocate teaching, administrative work, apprenticeships, and any other duties at its discretion. Teachers are required to remain available in the institutions during these working hours.

Teachers’ concerns have found mere lip service in DUTA’s feedback/petition, innocuously pleading for promotion scheme and workload stipulations to remain unchanged while not mentioning “notable contributions” and workload specifications. No serious critique of the disastrous academic implications of these assaults on teachers or any campaign to garner public opinion is in sight. The silence is a consequence of the compulsion not to displease the masters.

Counting of Past Service

Following countrywide protests by teachers, the 2018 UGC Regulations had done away with the irrational quantification introduced in 2010. It also recognised ad-hoc service as service to be counted towards promotions. Unfortunately, the benefit of the past service remained restricted to the first promotion. Following the permanent recruitment of a large number of teachers with long ad-hoc teaching experience, a sustained movement was needed to get the entire past service counted for all stages of promotions and towards retirement benefits. The Draft Regulations 2025 excludes ad-hoc teaching experience towards promotion.

Refusal to join collective struggles for restoration of OPS and withdrawal of MPhil/PhD increments

The same power-pleasing role has kept the DUTA away from joint movements with employees and teachers across India for the restoration of the Old Pension Scheme (OPS). The concession it got was for the administration to wait till the conclusion of the AC/EC elections before delivering a financial blow through a directive to deny increments upon acquiring M.Phil./Ph.D. degrees. In 2017, the same attempt by the government alongside its attempt to make pay revision conditional on universities bearing 30% of the financial requirement was met with massive collective protest with Rajib Ray as DUTA President. The Government had to backtrack. Outrage is muted now. College staff associations have been left to battle on an issue that is national.

Academic and workload burdens

The CUET-based admission policy has severely overburdened teachers and derailed academic calendars, short-circuiting the teaching-learning process. The academic restructuring has hollowed out academic programmes. Furthermore, the rolling out of Fourth Year of the FYUP will place an additional burden of supervision of research causing workloads to increase to levels detrimental to quality.

Promotion of ideological agenda and censorship

On the contrary, the pro-Government group pushes its ideological agenda not through scholarship. Critical enquiry and learning on social issues like gender and caste are targeted. The university administration has used AC and its Standing Committee on Academic matters to force Heads of Departments to delete topics essential to their respective disciplines, in the process diluting the content. They have also mandated the compulsorily adoption of topics and readings that reflect an uncritical zeal to include a version of IKS in every disciplinary pursuit. The hollowing out of academic rigour through censorship and administrative commands, and beyond academic debate, threatens students’ future.

Other matters of serious concern

The failure to restore Governing Bodies in the 12 Delhi government-funded colleges continues to undermine their democratic functioning and teachers’ representation.
Teachers and employees of colleges are now denied WUS Health Centre entitlements.
The issues of appropriate working and living conditions for differently abled teachers find no attention.
Assault on social justice through rampant use of NFS in appointments and denial of promotions.
No attempt to get teachers together for the demand for the constitution of the 8th UGC Pay Review Committee has been made.
Promotion scheme for instructors has not yet been resolved.

This is not the complete list of issues ignored by the current DUTA leadership, but teachers of DU can clearly see that their inaction and collusion have emboldened the administration and facilitated policies that degrade the teaching-learning process and exploit teachers, non-teaching colleagues, and students, thereby undermining public higher education.

A DTF-led DUTA, if elected, pledges to prioritise:

Concerted struggles and campaigns to secure teachers’ rights.
Building united movements with students, non-teaching colleagues, and teachers’ unions across the country.
Defending public-funded higher education, academic freedom, and the rights and dignity of all teachers.

The DTF urges Delhi University teachers to use the 4 September 2025 election as an opportunity to reclaim DUTA as a “fighting force,” rather than a body complicit in the “privatisation, commercialisation, and ideological assault on academics”.

Vote for the DTF team committed to required collective struggles to preserve our university, secure our rights, and defend public higher education for all. Elect Rajib Ray as DUTA President and his team from DTF and all like-minded activists to the DUTA Executive.