Kolkata: Jadavpur University has come up with the decision to distribute android phones to those students who cannot afford to buy one or the ones who are unable to attend online classes due to the lack of facilities. The decision was taken in the view of the new semester which is expected to begin this month, as per the information passed by an official on Sunday.
In addition to smartphones, the university also plans to provide data packs to the students pursuing science, arts and technical subjects, as informed by the Chiranjib Bhattacharya, Pro-Vice-Chancellor, Jadavpur University. He said, the work, for the same, is under process and the University will soon provide the promised facility as the classes for arts and science departments are expected to start from September 14. The new semester for engineering shall begin on September 25.
“We will provide them with good quality sets compatible with net facilities, sharing, uploading and downloading options and for those needing a good connectivity data pack and recharge for three months,” Bhattacharya said.
Highlighting the technicalities involved in online classes, he said that the classes will be conducted on the Google platform. Besides, the university will securely upload the contents and deliver lectures on its portal. Professors shall have access to the portal. They will share the links of required files and PDFs with students.
According to JU’s decision, the exams for the final semester in both arts and science domains will be held through online mode. The contact-free examinations shall begin from October 1 and continue till October 10. The questions will be sent through email a few minutes before the exam starts and students are supposed to submit the answer sheet in two hours of time. however, there will be extra time given by keeping the net connectivity issues but that cannot be indefinitely extended.
The university planned to conduct exams following UGC’s go-ahead to the state Higher education department to carry out the final semester exams in October said the Pro-VC.
The phones and data facilities will be provided from varsity’s collected funds from faculty and alumni members.
The appeal that paid for the android phones
The funding plan goes back to August. Vice-Chancellor Suranjan Das issued a circular asking staff to donate a day’s salary to a fund for handsets and connectivity, an appeal that Careers360 reported was meant to help about 800 students across the science, engineering and arts streams. “I feel it is our moral responsibility to provide the students who do not possess a smartphone with a smartphone,” Das wrote.
The university estimated it would need to raise about Rs 40 lakh, which works out at roughly Rs 5,000 a student. Das asked faculty members and staff to tell the university the “quantum” of their contribution within two to three days, a sign of how little time there was before the new semester.
A special fund was set up to buy basic smartphones and to pay for data connectivity for students who could not afford it. A circular from finance officer Gour Krishna Pattanayaak said teachers and other employees could opt to contribute from their salaries and pensioners from their pensions, “at will”, with consent sent by email. The university also approached the state government, chambers of commerce and its alumni association, though Das cautioned that those approaches “may not yield instant results”. The android phones promised in September are the output of that appeal: a fund built from staff, pensioners and alumni rather than a government grant.
Data packs: Jadavpur University’s exam calendar
The timetable the phones must serve is tight. Classes for arts and science were set to begin on September 14 and engineering on September 25, with contact-free final semester examinations from October 1 to 10, answers due back within two hours of the emailed question paper, and a buffer for poor connections that cannot stretch indefinitely.
The October window exists because of decisions taken far from Kolkata. On 28 August 2020, the Supreme Court held in Praneeth K and others v University Grants Commission that universities could not promote final year students without an examination, while allowing states that had decided under the Disaster Management Act that exams could not be held by 30 September to ask the UGC for a later date.
The UGC’s revised guidelines of July 2020 had set the end of September as the deadline and allowed the papers to be written offline, online or in a blend of the two. With the UGC’s go-ahead for October in West Bengal, Jadavpur University built its calendar inside that window. For a final semester student without a phone or data packs, an emailed question paper with a two-hour return window is out of reach.
The divide the handsets answer
A phone and a data pack sound like small things for a university to buy. The national statistics explain why they are not. The National Statistical Office’s 2017-18 survey of education, summarised by the Ministry of Statistics, found that only about 24 per cent of Indian households had internet access, that barely 4 per cent of rural households owned a computer, and that only about a quarter of rural Indians aged 15 to 29 had used the internet in the previous 30 days.
Among the same age group, about 24 per cent in the villages could operate a computer at all, against 56 per cent in the cities. The urban figures were better but far from universal: 42 per cent of urban households had internet access, 23 per cent owned a computer, and 58 per cent of urban 15 to 29 year olds had used the internet in the previous 30 days.
For students on the wrong side of those numbers, the android phones and the three months of recharge that come with them are the route into the Google-platform classrooms and the emailed examinations the university has planned. The scheme treats connectivity as study material, something the university provides to the student who cannot buy it.
