The Delhi High Court will today (Wednesday) take up for hearing a public interest litigation by a non-government organisation seeking a stay on implementation of the “discriminatory’’ four-year undergraduate programme (FYUP) by Delhi University from the next academic session.
The petitioner, Sambhavana, an organisation of physically-challenged teachers and students in the Capital, said that the existing design of FYUP was discriminatory as it did not take into account the aspirations and specific needs of visually-impaired students and other print-disabilities.
It stated that if the course in its present form was implemented, the visually-impaired students would suffer irreparable loss as a large number of them would not be able to avail of the proposed benefits from it.
Under the inter-disciplinary programme, students were required to study foundation courses from multiple streams. Two of the 11 foundation courses to be studied over first two semesters would be mathematics and science. In most cases, visually-impaired students were discouraged or practically barred from taking the two subjects after Class XIII, the petition said.
It further said that like most schools in Delhi, the university had not made adequate arrangements for teaching the two subjects to these students. Yet, the new programme has made it compulsory for all the students to study courses that required prior knowledge of science and mathematics, the petition stated.
The university had two options in this case. Either it could exempt these students from studying courses that required knowledge of the two subjects or it could tell them to look for some other universities. In either case, it would be treating them as second class students in complete violation of their fundamental and other legislative rights of equal participation, the petition said.
Source : The Hindu , 8th May 2013
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