Aspirants would be marked out of 100, depending on various factors, including whether they have received training and for how long, whether they have participated in competitions and at which level. (Express photo by Praveen Khanna)
Delhi University’s Standing Committee of the Academic Council Monday decided to hold admissions to all categories under the Extra-Curricular Activity (ECA) quota on the basis of self-attested certificates.
DU had earlier decided to scrap ECA admissions, barring National Cadet Corps (NCC) and National Service Scheme (NSS), but reconsidered days later. Several teachers have objected to the latest move as well, pointing out that admissions shouldn’t be given on the basis of just certificates.
The university had earlier said that this year, trials for Sports and ECA categories will not be held due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Keeping that in mind, the university said it had decided to hold sports quota admission through government-approved certificates. Since these certificates do not exist for ECA categories such as dance, theatre, music, etc, the decision was taken to scrap it altogether.
However, the move had attracted much criticism, with renowned dancers such as Geeta Chandran and Sonal Mansingh demanding that ECA admissions be reinstated. Most recently, Vice-President Venkaiah Naidu, who is also the DU Chancellor, urged DU to continue with ECA admissions.
On July 11, the university administration said it would be “prudent to revisit” the “partial exclusion of ECA” and instead “endeavour to find out a credible and viable mechanism of inclusion of ECA in the admissions for this academic year”.
Following this, on July 17, a meeting of the Sub-Committee for Sports and ECA decided that the performance trial marks (75) be clubbed with the certificate marks (25), and aspirants be evaluated on the basis of self-attested copies of certificates.
Aspirants would be marked out of 100, depending on various factors, including whether they have received training and for how long, whether they have participated in competitions and at which level.
The decision was given the green signal by the Admission Committee in its meeting on July 18 and by the Standing Committee Monday.
“The sub-committee on admissions brought the proposal to the standing committee to begin admissions under ECA category on the basis of certificates only by excluding trials (offline as well as online). I strongly objected to it as there is no way of authenticating the credibility of the ECA certificates, unlike sports, as there is no government-approved institutions issuing the certificates and this would do injustice to genuine candidates,” said Arun Atree, a member of the Standing Committee.
He said he emphasised on online trials but “the committee members pleaded lack of experts and infrastructure as the reason of doing away with even online trials”.
The move has drawn criticism from several teacher groups. Four AC and two EC members from Academics for Action & Development wrote to the DU V-C, saying, “Merely dependence on the certificates cannot be a sound basis of objective evaluation of the performance-based artistic skills. There should be trials for these disciplines.”
The Indian National Teachers’ Congress also wrote to the V-C: “On the one hand, Committee suspects the authenticity of uploaded ECA certificates and on the other hand it recommends the admission under ECA quota on the basis of ECA certificates only. We are not against ECA admissions but it should be done through the faculty of Music and Fine Arts.”
Dean Admissions Shobha Bagai and VC Yogesh Tyagi did not respond to calls and texts.