DUTA terms Tripartite MoU a cheap 'arm-twisting' method

NEW DELHI, SEPTEMBER 24: The Delhi University teachers body has once again termed the ‘Tripartite MoU’ allegedly being forced by the University Grants Commission (UGC) on the university, cheap arm-twisting and an attempt to subsume its autonomy.

Last year, the UGC issued a circular inviting universities to sign a Tripartite agreement with the Commission and the Ministry of Human Resource Development. As per the UGC, the move is aimed at providing enhanced autonomy and financial powers to the institutions.

The Delhi University is yet to respond to that circular as a large section of the university community is against signing any such MoU.

Delhi University Teachers Association (DUTA) in its statement issued has said that repeated threats, issued by the MHRD, that DU’s grants will be stopped unless the Tripartite MoU is signed, amounts to cheap arm-twisting and authoritarian suppression of DU’s academic independence.

The DUTA said, “The MoU is both devious and pernicious. While it pretends to seek qualitative improvement in output along with commensurate input requirements, it binds university to commercialise its activities and ensure structures that facilitate private players in higher education.”

The teachers are also opposing the move as the Tripartite MoU does not involve any commitment on the part of the UGC and MHRD for making additional funds available to the universities.
“Instead, it makes universities commit to raise user charges/fees to ensure that its various courses recover the maximum cost of providing services, to fund infrastructural requirements through loans from HEFA to be paid back by the universities through greater resource generation/cost recovery and earning revenue through other forms of commercial activities,” DUTA said.

To improve its finances the Tripartite agreement asks the universities to raise revenue through “innovative academic and training programmes”.

“The imposition of HEFA for funding infrastructural expansion means that the University’s land, physical infrastructure and intellectual assets may be used as collaterals to secure loans sourced through money raised from capital markets in which the private sector and private financial institutions have a big stake. This will open the floodgates to wholesale privatisation and eventually result in the handover of publicly-owned educational resources to private hands,” alleges DUTA.