First DTF Leaflet for for DUTA Elections, 2025

Reclaim DUTA as a site of teachers’ struggles!
Save Teachers, Save Education!
Elect Rajib Ray as DUTA President!

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.

That ability has been severely compromised. The DUTA has been reduced to a pocket organisation serving the DU administration and the Union government. It neglects to fight for teachers’ rights and academic integrity. It cannot displease the authorities. It has become a lower-order power centre, not their collective instrument for struggle, gradually making them voiceless and vulnerable.

11 July 2025 High Court Order

A High Court order, citing the 20 December 2024 Supreme Court Jaggo judgment 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 Institutional Development Plan (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 for annual hikes regularly. 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’:

(1) Clauses 3.8–3.10 require ‘notable contributions‘ as a precondition for promotion. To be eligible for promotion, a teacher ha to secure market funding, in addition to promoting IKS and online education, etc.

(2) A daily workload of ‘not less than eight hours‘ is specified. The administration of each institution is empowered to allocate teaching hours, administrative work, apprenticeships, and any other duty. Teachers are to remain available in the institutions during these working hours.

Leaving the evaluation of notable contributions to each selection committee i.e., each institution as well as leaving the power to allocate workload to each institution are in keeping with the “light but tight” regulatory norm of the NEP to enforce a form of accountability. The Economic Survey 2024-25 candidly explains this idea of accountability: “There is no greater accountability than that demanded by the market through prospective faculty, students, their parents, and collaborating academic and non-academic institutions.” Hence, the enablers in the Draft UGC Regulations & Guidelines for each institution is to compete for its place in the market.

The DUTA feedback / petition offers only lip service. It requests that the current promotion scheme and workload stipulations remain unchanged. It does not even mention (1) “notable contributions” and (2) workload without a ceiling and administrative allocation of duties, both proposed in the documents. No critique of the disastrous academic implications of these proposals is attempted by the DUTA, let alone any campaign to garner public opinion against the assault on public character of HEIs, teachers and standards of teaching-learning.

DUTA’s silence has invited the infamous stopgap 8 am to 8 pm notification

There was a time when the UGC regulations used to insist that ‘no teacher shall be expected to lecture/discussion for more than three clock hours per day’ for maintenance of standards. The current NEP alignment vision of ‘not less than eight hours‘ needed public exposure. In 2002 and 2016 governmental moves to increase teaching load were pushed back through DUTA’s public critique, campaign and protest actions. This notification contains clauses which are detrimental to the teaching-learning process.

University 8 am to 8 pm Notification

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. And now this notification, celebrated by the NDTF as reassertion of 14/16 hours, brings in the following:

8 am to 8 pm schedule with a staggered timetable of minimum 5 hours and at least 2 hours per day for mentoring 10 students for every teacher.

8 am to 8 pm is a disastrous response to shortage of teachers and infrastructure caused by government refusal to provide adequate number of teachers and appropriate infrastructure to meet EWS expansion and addition of one more year to undergraduate programme.
It fails to recognise that evening colleges exist and ignores safety concerns over students and teachers commuting the city at late hours.
Staggered timetable will cause either the students or the teachers or both to spend long hours without having teaching-learning or research proper space. The only way this can be redressed a little is to confine each teacher to courses offered for students of particular year, an academically disastrous idea.
The insistence on minimum 5 hours and at least 2 hours for mentoring sets aside the precondition of provision of proper space, something even the UGC Regulations laying down 14 / 16 hours a week specify. The university administration has given up all academic pretences.

The supervision of research in the fourth year is now officially over and above the stipulation of workload of maximum 14/16 hours for teachers.

This is a step towards the implementation of the Draft Guidelines 2025 where there is no upper limit on teaching hours.
This overload, violating the UGC Regulations, confirms that academic considerations are foreign to NEP.

Only senior faculty should teach and supervise the students of the fourth year.

An artificial academic hierarchy will vitiate the cordiality among teachers.
It compromises standards of teaching and learning by allotting papers not per academic interests and specialisation but by a whimsical category of seniority. Academic considerations have been substituted by administrative whims and fancies.
In colleges, especially the 12 colleges fully funded by the Delhi Government, where permanent appointments have not taken place yet, it may be logistically impossible apart from adding salt to the wound suffered by those working in ad hoc capacity.

Last but not least, the most unethical recommendation of this notification is to allow permanent teachers to take guest lectures over and above 14/16 hours of teaching for additional remuneration.

The idea is to make teachers complicit in changing the workload norms. If teaching-learning standards do not get adversely affected by arbitrarily longer hours of teaching (voluntarily accepted), what arguments are we to make against the anti-academic proposal of ‘not less than eight hours’ a day?
Many ad hoc teachers, who were displaced during permanent appointments, are working as guests. Many, with long years of service. are still awaiting guest positions. Denial of opportunity and hope to teachers who have suffered injustice is unforgivable.

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 have the entire past service counted at all stages of promotions and towards retirement benefits.

A positive development is the recent Supreme Court Jaggo judgment that ordered counting of the entire past service of the employees while ordering their regularisation. The intent of the government is in the Draft UGC Regulations 2025 that omits ad-hoc teaching experience.

Post-doctoral research experience in Indian institutes is not being counted towards promotion on flimsy technical ground while similar experience in most institutions abroad get counted.

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).

MPhil/PhD increments

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 government had tried this and, further, attempted to make pay revision conditional on universities bearing 30% (30:70 formula for autonomous bodies) of the financial requirement. Massive collective protests with Rajib Ray as DUTA President had forced it to backtrack. Outrage is muted now. College staff associations are left battling on an issue that is national.

Denial of pay & pensionary benefits

DUTA has remained silent while the follwing entitlements granted to government employees are denied to teachers (employees of autonomous bodies).

Notional increment during promotion and for those retiring on June 30.
OPS for those recruited against posts advertised before 1.1.2024. (UGC notification, 3 March 2023)
Extension of OPS provisions to employees under NPS in cases of unfortunate demise (introduced during Covid period and withdrawn for universities vide UGC letter, 6.8.2025).

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.
No attempt to get teachers together for the demand for the constitution of the 8th UGC Pay Review Committee has been made.
CAS for Instructors
Retirement age of teachers of Physical Education appointed before 1991 as per the EC Resolution should be protected.
The parity of librarians with teachers in terms of their recruitment and retirement age.
Implementation of 7 CPC in Centres like CEMDE Bio-diversity Parks).
Associate Professors are not eligible for Study Leave nor are they eligible Sabbatical Leave till they complete 7 years. As a result, teachers getting prestigious fellowships in Institutions or Universities in India or abroad are unable to avail them.
The university notification on Maternity Leave to ad hoc and contract employees often becomes a lip service due to ambiguities.
Illegal recoveries from retired teachers, teachers on the verge of retirement and in cases where the overpayment was made by the administration more than five years earlier continue.
Newly appointed teachers in many departments are still awaiting allotment of rooms and labs.
The SOP dated 3.6.2024 and DU Notification of 20.7.2023 add another layer to the recruitment of teachers in colleges. Candidates must make presentation to yet another committee prior to facing the Selection Committee.
The university administration insists on papers published in Scopus-indexed journals for promotion and recruitment in departments and for recruitment of Principals. Publications in other peer-reviewed and refereed journals are not considered by the university in violation of the UGC Regulations.
Efforts to retain
Imposition of ITEP in place of B.El.Ed. which had organically developed programme and was doing extremely well.
Instead of meeting the demand for regularisation of self-financing courses like Computer Science, NEP derivative self-financing courses like Integrated Law, BTech and ITEP with steep fees have been introduced.
Out-of-turn house allotment in the university has become a persistent practice.
Continuation of Principals beyond two terms.
While battling API and then requirement of journal publications for promotion, the long-standing demand of three assured promotions till Professorship has been neglected. It needs to be revived to bring back focus on teaching and building institutions.

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.

Appropriate working and living conditions for differently abled teachers find no attention

An example of this larger malaise is the case of Mistreatment of Ms. Sharmishta Atreja, a fully visually impaired faculty member of Department of Philosophy, had to seek judicial intervention to secure for herself a disabled-friendly university accommodation.

It is indicative of a much larger absence of sensitivity and willingness to find just solutions.

Assault on social justice through NFS in appointments and denial of promotions

Many posts under reserved categories in the departments were kept vacant using NFS. The insistence on Scopus indexation has become one more tool for subversion of the constitutional imperative of social justice at the screening stage.

Dr. Ashok Kumar, Department of Physics and Astrophysics, has been denied promotion to Professor. He has far more than the requisite qualifications and is acknowledged by the university for bringing laurels to it through his research. The application of Dr. Ratan Lal, who teaches History in Hindu College, dated 26.10.2020 for promotion to Professor by has not been processed. He has been denied sabbatical leave. His request to withdraw money from his PF account is not being processed. There are many other such cases of targeting.

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.

The DTF is trying 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.