Delhi University Executive Council to vote on April 30 regarding BA Programme restructuring that could quietly push India’s minority languages off campus.
Delhi University Executive Council (EC) is meeting on April 30 to decide the future of the BA Programme (BAP). The changes, if approved, will come into effect from the academic session 2026–27.
The proposal follows recommendations made by DU’s Academic Council on April 15, and was prepared by a committee that includes key university officials such as the Dean of Colleges, Registrar, Dean of Admissions, and principals of colleges like Shaheed Bhagat Singh College, Miranda House, and Daulat Ram College.
In respect of the restructuring, Delhi University colleges have been asked to look at BA Programme combinations where student demand is low or seats remain empty, and consider merging certain disciplines into broader combinations. For example, languages like Urdu, Arabic, Persian, Bengali, and Telugu may be offered as a single BA Programme combination with just one other subject. Similarly, subjects like Social Work or Sociology may be paired with more popular disciplines.
Suggested changes in the document include replacement of courses like OMSP (Office Management and Secretarial Practice) by plain Commerce as a discipline. Subjects like Food Technology and Human Development and Family Empowerment (HDFE) may similarly be merged under a broader Community Science category.
Importantly, the document suggests that no new programmes will be introduced and no existing programmes will be discontinued. Colleges will also not be allowed to change their total sanctioned intake capacity, though they may increase seats within an existing programme if they have enough faculty and infrastructure.
These recommendations came out of a series of meetings held with multiple college principals at the Vice Regal Lodge earlier this year. The Executive Council took this decision to cure the problem of many empty seats in specific BA Programme combinations where there wasn’t even one applicant for every two seats.
A presentation made before college principals showed that while commerce courses had over 110% seat utilisation, language courses had the lowest fill rate, just 81.22%. This is where teachers and elected council members raised loud objections about combinations involving Indian languages like Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Punjabi, and Urdu being unfairly targeted even though these courses already have very few seats to begin with.
Tamil professor Uma Devi pointed out that the real crisis is a shortage of teachers, not a shortage of students. Across DU, there are only two permanent Tamil teachers in colleges, three in the department, and only one teacher each for Kannada, Malayalam, and Marathi. “Whenever a teacher retires, the university simply does not recruit a new one,” she said.
Imtiaz Ahmad, a faculty member in DU’s Department of Urdu, described the situation bluntly:
Urdu was offered in many colleges earlier. It did not shut down overnight. It was closed one by one, over a long period. Today, it is available in only about nine colleges.”
The Executive Council meeting isn’t only about BAP. The council is also set to consider infrastructure proposals worth hundreds of crores, including ₹174.20 crore for a new building for the Institute of Nano Medical Sciences at Maurice Nagar, and a revised estimate of ₹233.35 crore for studio apartments at Dhaka Complex, partly funded through a HEFA loan.
Separately, DU’s Academic Council has already approved one-year postgraduate programmes and a new Semester Away Program (SAP) that would let DU students spend a semester at foreign universities in line with the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020. If the Executive Council approves the BAP restructuring on April 30, the changes will be put in place from the 2026–27 academic session which means students applying this year through CUET-UG could be the first batch to experience the new structure.
On one side, the university says it is simply making the programme more efficient. On the other, teachers and students warn that what looks like an administrative fix could quietly erode decades of language teaching and cultural diversity from one of India’s oldest universities.
As EC member Mithuraaj Dhusiya’s dissent note put it: “When languages disappear, cultures disappear.”
Image Credits: Devansh for DU Beat
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Arshia Sharma
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