New Delhi: Bowing down to protests against recent changes in the admission policy, JNU Vice Chancellor Jagadesh Kumar today clarified the cap on the number of research students a faculty member can have will not be applicable for current students.
"The students already enrolled in M Phil courses will not be affected by this rule. There will be no retrospective implementation of the amendments," Kumar told reporters.
Earlier, Kumar had taken a different stand saying those enrolled for M Phil programmes will not be directly promoted to PhD.
JNU administration and JNUSU have been trading charges over UGC notification on PhD/M Phil admissions approved by decision-making bodies of JNU.
Students have been occupying the administration block in protest while the VC has been accusing them of trying to make the university "dysfunctional" through the "illegal siege".
JNUSU has accused Kumar of not meeting the students and making "arbitrary" decisions and "fundamental" changes in JNU's admission policy and research programmes.
Replacing JNU's topic-based system of allotting supervisors to students with supervisor allotment based on a specified number of students per faculty, will destroy quality of research in JNU which is India's best central university, JNUSU president Mohit Pandey said.