New Delhi
The University Grants Commission (UGC) announced on Tuesday that students will now be able to pursue two full-time academic programmes in physical mode. The commission has put together the guidelines for the same, which have been put up on the official website of UGC.
Earlier, the UGC regulations did not allow students to pursue two full-time programmes and they could only pursue one full-time degree along with online/short-term/diploma courses. The guidelines will apply to all the programmes available across the country. Students can either choose a combination of a diploma programme and an undergraduate (UG) degree, two master’s programmes, or two bachelor’s programmes. If a student is eligible to pursue a postgraduate (UG) degree and also wants to enrol in a bachelor’s degree in a different domain, he/she will be able to pursue a UG and PG degree simultaneously. The class timing for both the programmes must not clash.
“In the last commission meeting held on March 31, it was decided to issue guidelines which would enable students to pursue two academic programmes together because the NEP 2020 emphasises the need to facilitate multiple pathways to learning involving both formal and non-formal education forms, in the sense that a combination of the physical model, as well as the online form, should be used to provide more freedom to the students to acquire multiple skills,” the UGC chairman, Mamidala Jagadesh Kumar said.
Following the new guidelines, students will be able to pursue two degree programmes across domains such as sciences, social sciences, arts, humanities, and a wide variety of disciplines. Adopting these guidelines is optional for universities and can be implemented only after the approval of the universities’ statutory bodies. The eligibility criteria for each of the programmes will remain unchanged and admissions will be conducted based on the existing UGC, university norms.
“A student can pursue two full-time academic programmes in the physical mode provided that in such cases, class timings for one programme do not overlap with the class timings of the other programme. Universities will have the flexibility to decide if they want to offer such a scheme of programmes or not. The guidelines will only be applicable to lecture-based courses, including undergraduate, postgraduate, and diploma programmes. MPhil and PhD programmes will not fall under the same scheme,” Kumar added.
