DU shortens winter break for UG students to just four days amid academic calendar shuffle

New Delhi, Jul 10 (PTI) The Delhi University (DU) has shortened its winter break for students studying in the third and fifth semester of the UG programme, reducing it to just four days from December 29 to January 1, 2025, according to an official notification.

The move has drawn flak from the students and teachers alike who rue that the change in the 2024-2025 academic calender of the varsity will disturb their schedule and put undue burden on them.

Usually, the winter break for the Delhi University UG students is announced for about 15-20 days, the teachers said.

In a notification issued on Tuesday, the DU informed that the classes for semester third and fifth will start from August 1 while the classes will begin from January 2 for semester fourth and sixth next year.

The DU has not released the academic calender for first year students yet, admissions for which are expected to get delayed due to delay in declaration of the CUET results.

The winter break for the semester third and fifth will commence from December 29 till January 1, 2025, the notification stated.

Raising concern over the shortening of the holidays in the new academic calender, several teachers expressed apprehension that this would impact the students coming from other states.

The teachers also raised concern over the DU not releasing the academic calender for first year students yet and said it will lead to overlap in classes held simultaneously for different batches and will burden the teachers.

"Pre-COVID Delhi University used to release a common academic calender for all the three years. However, due to the disruption caused by the pandemic, the varsity started releasing the schedule separately. In a bid to regularise the calender, in 2023 again a common calender was released.

"Now, the varsity's move to release the schedule for only second and third year students shows that there will be a delay in holding the admissions this year due to the delayed CUET results. This will stagger our academic calender and cause logistical issues in taking classes when all batches are onboarded," Maya John, a faculty at Jesus and Marry college said. "This is another repercussion of faulty functioning of NTA due to which the academic calendar of the University of Delhi has been derailed. The testing agency a couple of days back released answer key for CUET, definitely the final results of CUET would not be declared before first week of August," said Pankaj Garg, chairman, Congress teachers' wing INTEC.

A faculty at DU's Kirori Mal College said, "It is important to note that DU has not been able to notify the academic calendar for semesters I/II, that is, the first year in undergraduate programmes owing to the ongoing NTA fiasco. This is the third year in succession that the UG admission process has been delayed in DU owing to the CUET.

"In 2022-23, when CUET was first introduced in DU for UG admission, the classes for semester 1 began in November because the Ministry of Education could not get its act together in conducting CUET on time. Last year in 2023-24, despite CUET being conducted early, the academic calendar began on August 16, 2023: three weeks after the scheduled time owing to delay in the declaration of results. And this year, there is no sight of admission happening in the near future since the very process of CUET is under scanner, thanks to the NTA," he added. PTI SJJ AS AS