Dinesh Singh: Education

The past few years have been trying for Dinesh Singh, Vice Chancellor of University of Delhi. He has singlehanded spearheaded unleashing of reforms – first time during the last 70 years – in the university system that has stirred many a hornet’s nests. The new Four Year Undergraduate Programme is aimed at the overall development of personality, use of ICT in education and revamping the academic structural system of the teaching-learning process. It also equally well helps teachers in each of its constituent colleges who will get to frame and teach their own courses and supervise research according to their own academic strengths.

Dinesh, in another first, decided that all the 65,000 new student entrants during 2013-14, get a laptop free-of-cost. The university has also started a theme train ‘College on Wheels’ called ‘Gyanodaya Express’ with wi-fi connectivity on-board, which carries 1,000 students and about 100 teachers for a 10-day education trip in an effort to enhance the project-based learning-teaching process. The train is already doing trips exposing them to places of academic interest like Benaras Hindu University, rich culture of Punjab or naval base in South India. There has hardly been a more exciting time to be a college teacher in University of Delhi — or a college student.