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Is JNU an epitome

of bad socialism?

Media questioned

The JNU, which is mostly in the news for wrong reasons has made news again over recent protests and
attack by masked goons on students and teachers. However, it has hogged limelight after actor Deepika
Padukone visited the campus in a show of solidarity with the students. Her evening visit to the university
to promote her movie on an acid victim Chhapaak and her images with JNU Students Union chief Aishe
Ghosh, instantly polarized opinion on social media, where trends ranged from #ISupportDeepika and

#BoycottChhapaak to #shameonbollywood. A compilation by shveta mishra

ot taking any sides, let’s study the base issue over in the overall scheme of things. So what do we observe here.
which protests began that is the fee hike in accom- JNU spends about 556 crores per year on its functioning. This
modation, mess and other charges. While many is aside of the fixed assets it has, the huge land base, the infra
justify the low fees and condemn the nominal fee & building it owns which was built on government money at
N hike, statistics prove that JNU is the most subsi- some point. I see that some depreciation is accounted for.
dized university in the country and its students are pampered So what is the cost per student at JNU ? We can calculate.
the most. 556 crore/8000 students gives us 6.95 lac per student annu-
Anurag Singh, a value investor and finance mentor who is ally. Although the university calculations somewhere quote
quite active on Twitter, provides an insight into the root cause this number as 2.33 lac per student ( 170 crore/7304), this
and whether in the first place, the protests are justified or not. calculation is seriously flawed. The real numbers have to di-
Let’s go one step at a time. Do you know how many courses vide the entire university expenses by the number of students.
are there at JNU & what is the student strength? Here is how There can be no university withoput students so all expenses
it looks. There are a total of 8000 students at JNU. Of this, the eventually have to come from student body & other income.
lion’s share of 57 per cent students is of social sciences, lan- Even if we exclude “other income” & count only the govt
guage, literature and arts (4578 students) & International stud- subsidy & grants, we have a total expense of 352 crore over
ies 15 per cent (1210 students). So between the two categories, 8000 students. We can safely assume that each student con-
we have 72 per cent of the campus covered. sumes 4.4 lacs of government subsidy at JNU every year.
There is another interesting statistic here. Almost 55 per Shocking how public money can be misused at scale. What
cent of the total student strength i.e. 4,359 students are doing talent are we producing at this high cost subsidy ? This is com-
M.Phil. or Ph.D. At any campus across the world, the strength of peting with IITs & IIMs fee.
students declines as we move from under-grad courses to post
grad & there are very few who pursue doctorate level courses. Research, publications & patents at JNU
This is also driven by financial compulsions, as people need Now the students would say that JNU is an academics focused
to get back to the earning workforce fast & get on to a career institution & it should not be compared with commercial insti-
track. I couldn’t find specific information about why did JNU tutions. Fair point. I tried to dig in the kind of work & research
chose to have such high strength of M.Phil. & Doctoral level papers JNU publishes. You would be surprised that for an in-
students. Anyways we’ll use this number once again to derive stitution which claims to be the center of academics on social
some conclusions so keep this in mind. sciences, the claims on the website seem pretty sketchy. Read
for yourself as I quote from the website:
Govt spending on JNU Publications: The faculty of the University has been regularly
Look at the Profit & Loss account of JNU for 2018. This is from publishing many research journal articles, books; contributed
the 600 page annual report, & this one page, which should pos- chapters in books; presented papers in national and interna-
sibly be the first section on any annual report, is hidden some- tional conferences/workshops and delivered several lectures
where in the middle. Probably this was not very important outside the University.
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