New Delhi: Students' groups on Monday staged protests here against the Delhi University (DU) administration over the high cut-offs announced for undergraduate admission.
The protests were held by the Krantikari Yuva Sangathan (KYS) and the Left-affiliated Students' Federation of India (SFI). They said that high cut-offs would favour students of big private schools and demanded more transparency in the admission process.
DU announced its first cut-off list for undergraduate admission on Saturday with Lady Shri Ram (LSR) College for Women pegging the score at 100% for three Honours courses.
The 100% cut-off for undergraduate admissions in DU comes after a gap of five years.
Activists of the KYS burnt an effigy of the cut-off list to highlight its "discriminatory nature" and demanded that it be done away with immediately, the students' group said in a statement.
"This cut-off that is decided on the basis of marks scored by students of big private schools is nothing but a policy of ensuring that the most marginalised student does not have any access to quality higher education. This ensures that students who bear the brunt of substandard public-funded school education are turned away from public-funded universities," they said.
KYS activists were detained by police during the protest.
Twenty activists of the KYS were protesting at the Arts Faculty, North Campus, a senior police officer said.
"Eight of them were detained when they refused to disperse. They were taken to Maurice Nagar police station," the officer said.
Meanwhile, the SFI submitted a memorandum to the university vice chancellor "regarding the unfair and unjustifiably high cut-offs for undergraduate admissions," it said in a statement.
The memorandum was submitted by SFI Delhi president Sumit Kataria, it said.
"We strongly demand a transparent admission process and we stand firmly against such exclusionary methods that only favour the high society," it added.
While the 100% cut-offs have been a matter of debate, the required marks were expected to be higher this year as over 1.84 lakh students scored above 90% and more than 41,000 students scored above 95% = marks in CBSE Class 12 exams.
LSR College has pegged 100% score for three courses for general category aspirants -- BA (Hons) Economics, BA (Hons) Political Science and BA (Hons) Psychology.
The college has the highest cut-off among Science courses as well. It has announced a cut-off of 99.75% for admission to B.Sc (Hons) Statistics for general category students, while Hindu College has pegged the score for the same course at 99.25%.
Hindu College has announced a cut-off of 99.33% for B.Sc (Hons) Physics.
Among the BA programme combinations, aspirants need to have a minimum of 99.25% for gaining admission for a combination of Economics and Political Science in LSR College, the highest among all the combinations.
