Only 11 candidates passed the June 2010 National Eligibility Test for English, whose results were announced on October 9. Of these, there are only two recipients of the Junior Research Fellowship (JRF).
Anybody aspiring to teach in colleges and Universities are required to pass the NET, conducted by the University Grants Commission biannually.
The UGC has been trying to make the NET all-pervasive, making it mandatory even for ad-hoc teachers. Junior Research Fellowships are given to NET toppers.
The UGC is yet to release a centre and subject-wise break-up of the data. The Indian Express has used data compiled by NET aspirants, who were students of Delhi University.
Despite repeated attempts, officials at the UGC were not available for comment. Surender Singh, Deputy Secretary and head of the NET Bureau at the UGC, refused to con firm the numbers.
The total number of candidates who took the test is not available. However, comparisons with other subjects confirm the worst fears.
A total of 309 candidates have cleared the Economics NET, and 113 of them got JRFs.
In Political Science, 516 cleared with 248 JRFs. History has 33 JRFs and 64 non-JRF NET qualifications.
English comes behind even subjects like Defence and Strategic Studies, Music, and Museology and Conservation.
Delhi, a centre for which numbers are available, is a case in point. More than 1100 candidates took the English NET in Delhi, of whom only two cleared it. One of them has been awarded the JRF.
That it has a clutch of prestigious institutions reflect in the performance of Delhi as a NET examination centre: 606 of the total 3,242 JRFs have gone to candidates who took the test in Delhi. Jaipur comes a surprising second, far behind with 275 JRFs.
Delhi leads in non-JRF NET too, contributing 486 of a total of 3991 passed. Jaipur is again second, with 278 non-JRF NETs.
Even with such impressive figures, Delhi too fares badly when it comes to English.
"The number of candidates who clear the English NET has been low for some time now, but this is by far the lowest. I think it is time that the UGC accepts that something is wrong with the system — it never manages to get good teachers as evaluators," said Head of the Department of English at the Delhi University, Sumanyu Satpathy.
Delhi University, facing an acute shortage of NET-qualified individuals, had decided to advertise on a national level for subjects like English, Economics and Computer Science recently. With about 75,100 vacancies in English alone, the crisis is set to worsen.
Candidates who took the English NET in June said it was not a difficult paper. "It was my third attempt and I was confident I would qualify. There were no issues with the paper this time — they had simplified it considerably and there were no grammatical and spelling errors unlike previous years," said a candidate who gave the test in Delhi.
Source: Indian Express
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