Students of the Hyderabad campus of Tata Institute of Social Sciences have started protesting against the institute’s recent decision to scrap the BA Social Sciences programme and to shut down the hostel facility.
In an online petition on Change.org, the students said: “Despite being one of the few government-funded undergraduate programmes offering quality social sciences education with an interdisciplinary approach, the institute decided to cancel the BA Social Sciences programme without officially providing any reason. Being primarily funded by the government, students from marginalised sectors could afford relatively, a social science programme which has a curriculum highly relevant for each person to become strongly-opinionated and question the rigid oppressive structure that has been normalised for so many years,” the petition reads.
Further, 300 students will be affected as residential facilities close down. Agitated students accused the administration of taking the decision without informing the students’ body and timing it strategically to coincide with the semester-break, the News Minute reported.
However, Professor Siva Raju, deputy director at TISS said: “The course has not been fully scrapped. It will be reintroduced later.” He also clarified that they decided to make the campus non-residential as the administration wants to create a permanent campus here. Presently, TISS in Hyderabad functions out of the land leased out from the Telangana Panchayat Department.
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