A new team of the Jawaharlal Nehru University Teachers Association (JNUTA) was appointed on Tuesday. Professor Bishnupriya Dutt has been elected as president. While Professor Sucharita Sen has been elected to the post of secretary. Out of the total 19 members of JNUTA, 11 are women.
“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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Dutt is currently the associate professor in theatre studies at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, JNU. She completed her PhD in dramatic critical literature. She was earlier a lecturer and reader at the Department of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Calcutta from 1989 to 2000. She was also appointed as the associate professor in SAA (Theatre and performance studies) since its inception in 2001. She has directed and performed in over 50 plays with People’s Little Theatre, Calcutta.
With Dutt’s election, the university has women holding the top posts including Professor Santishree D Pandit who has recently been appointed as the first woman vice-chancellor of JNU and Aishe Ghosh who is the president of the the university’s student’s union.
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 teachers’ body said research programmes have been particularly hit hard, with the share of women scholars dipping to 41 per cent in 2019-20. It added 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.
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“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 further added that they would collate viewpoints of colleagues and find out strategies for the implementation of NEP 2020.
— with inputs from PTI
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