DU finally gives green signal to 28 departments for 4 years courses

DU admissions are round the corner and Delhi University is making each and every effort to lure more students to DU this year. It has given green signal to much talk about and most awaited four year undergraduate programmes. Now, the admission process for these four-year undergraduate programmes will commence from June, 2013. The Delhi University’s Academic Council has passed courses of 28 different departments for the new course structure to be started from this academic year. Registrar Alka Sharma said, "The Academic Council approved courses in Discipline 1, Discipline 2 as well as Application courses of 28 departments in a marathon meeting of 92 Council members."

The Academic Council has cleared the course syllabus recommended by Standing Committee for subjects to be offered as major and minor and applied courses. Apart from this, it has given green signal to 11 foundational courses which will be mandatory for all students. Academic Council member and Director of South Campus, Umesh Rai said, most of the courses of faculty of arts and sciences were passed. He said, "All the courses which come under Faculty of Interdisciplinary and Applied Sciences like electronics, instrumentation, microbiology, biochemistry were passed. Besides most of the courses related to Faculty of Arts including English, Hindi, Hindi Journalism, Urdu, Punjabi, Arabic, Persian, Sanskrit, Philosophy, Psychology also were passed."

Amitav Chakrobarty informed that total 1,013 papers and 89 courses had been passed in the meeting. He said, "1,013 papers of 28 departments were passed. Minor changes were made in the meeting that were recommended by the Standing Committee,"

Besides, there were many committee members which were not in favour of these four year programmes and showed their disagreement on the structure of courses. S K Sagar, member of Academic Council said, "Lot of discussion happened. I have also given a note of dissent. If this course will get implemented, the workload of teachers will be reduced for the first two years. So due to this, some of the ad hoc teachers might be asked to leave."

Some other courses also got approved in the meeting such as Biomedical Science, Botany, Zoology, Home Science. In these programmes students with get opportunity to exit programme at different points, the process of this programme will be different from the traditional courses with existing pattern of 10+2+3. This new system is being watched closely by other universities, looking forward to introduce interdisciplinary pedagogy improve the standard of education and impart technical and employable skills.