India News | New Team of JNU Teachers' Association Appointed

New Delhi, Mar 8 (PTI) A new team of the Jawaharlal Nehru University Teachers Association (JNUTA) was appointed on Tuesday with Professor Bishnupriya Dutt being elected to the president's post, according to a statement.

With her election, the university has women holding the top posts. Professor Santishree D Pandit was recently appointed as the first woman vice-chancellor of the university. Aishe Ghosh has been serving as the president of the student's union.

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Dutt has been appointed as the president while Professor Sucharita Sen has been elected to the post of secretary.

"It is serendipitous that our team, which has 11 women out of a total of 19 members, is being handed over the JNUTA responsibility on International Women's Day. We are, however, concerned that gender justice on the campus has been greatly compromised in the last few years," the JNUTA said in a statement.

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The JNUTA said that only 17.7 per cent of the faculty recruited between 2017 and 2020 were women.

"This share was 14 per cent among posts reserved for OBCs and nil for posts reserved for STs and PwDs," they said.

The JNU, through its system of deprivation points, had established an admission system that facilitated the entry of women and students from remote and backward regions, they said, adding that the university had reached an enviable share of above 60 per cent women among the admitted students.

"After dilution of the deprivation point system, the share has been steadily declining over the past years from 54 per cent in 2016-17 to 45.5 per cent in 2019-20, " they alleged.

Sharing the numbers, the teachers' body said research programmes have been particularly hit hard, with the share of women scholars dipping to 41 per cent in 2019-20.

The JNUTA said that it will focus on overdue promotions of colleagues and facilitating retirement benefits due to retiring faculty members among other rights that have been denied to them in the last six years.

"Institutional functioning to restore the teaching-learning and research environment that has been damaged greatly in the last few years and this would involve moving back to the democratic principles embedded in the JNU Act, Statutes and Ordinances," they said.

They said that they would collate viewpoints of colleagues and work out effective strategies and mechanisms of engagement with the NEP implementation.

(The above story is verified and authored by Press Trust of India (PTI) staff. PTI, India’s premier news agency, employs more than 400 journalists and 500 stringers to cover almost every district and small town in India.. The views appearing in the above post do not reflect the opinions of LatestLY)