Students cry foul over IISc dept weekly hrs rule

A new attendance policy ata department of the prestigious Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, requires 200 MTech and first-year PhD students to spend at least 50 hours a week in departmental labs, with senior PAD scholars expected to match their advisors’ 70-80-hour a week schedules, documents seen by HT show.

- Sanjay Maurya

Students at the Department of Electronic Systems Engineering (ESE), who currently have no spec ified working hours and just need to mark attendance twice ina day, have called the policy an attempt to bring “corporate culture” of counting hours into academia, raising health, privacy, and surveillance concerns. The policy was introduced by department chair Mayank Shrivastava in an October 2 email.

On October I, the IISc Students Council submitted a petition to IISc director demanding the withdrawal of the policy, said the student council petition, a copy of which has been seen by HT. The students said that new policy that requires working 14-16 hours every day would leave no time for restor social life and “could lead to arise in suicides.”