In the backdrop of the protests against the citizenship law and the National Register of Citizens, a narrative targeting a few universities has been making rounds on the internet. It’s a simple narrative: students at left-leaning universities study subjects that have little market value, spend their days protesting and, as such, are wasting their taxpayer-funded education. So, I thought why not test whether this narrative holds a candle to truth or is simply fiction. 

For this exercise, I thought no two universities would serve a better purpose than Jawaharlal Nehru University, considered a bastion of leftist student politics, and the Banaras Hindu University, a Hindutva stronghold. The intention is not to establish which university has found efficient ways to spend taxpayer money, but to see whether the selective outrage over JNU has any basis at all. I won’t rely on the rankings of these two universities since they are easily available for everyone to see. Instead, I will do a comparison based on publicly available information to find out if there is significant discrepancy between how the two universities spend their resources. 

First, let’s look at their finances. Since both are central universities, substantial portions of their finances are derived from the University Grants Commission funds. According to their respective annual reports for 2017-18, BHU gets an annual grant of Rs 1,122 crore while JNU gets a much smaller amount of Rs 352 crore. However, since they have vastly different student populations, it would be more appropriate to compare the UGC grant per student. The average annual UGC grant per student is Rs 3.64 lakh at BHU and Rs 4.36 lakh at JNU. While the gap may appear significant, the fact that JNU is located in Delhi and BHU in Varanasi would account for much of the difference. JNU, though, is significantly ahead when it comes to generating income from its own sources, spending around Rs 38,390 of this money per student compared to Rs 10,479 at BHU. Going by these numbers, JNU isn’t any more profligate than BHU. 

Another common accusation by the Hindutva camp against JNU students is that they study subjects that are not career-oriented. To test this, let’s compare the proportion of students in each university enrolled in subjects typically considered liberal arts – Arts, Performing Arts, Visual Arts, Languages and Literature, including Ayurveda and Unani. In BHU, the total number of students studying liberal arts is 10,653, or about 35% of the total student population. JNU’s annual report doesn’t provide a department-wise breakup of the student population, so I took the number of students graduating from each department in 2017-18 as a proxy. While this method is simplistic, it relies on the reasonable assumption that students in each department spend roughly the same period of time enrolled in the programme. For JNU, the proportion of graduating students in liberal arts was 24%, which is much lower than that at BHU. Clearly, the idea that JNU is oriented more towards liberal arts is not correct.  

One of the most important metrics for an institution of higher education is the scholarly output of its faculty members. For the purpose of this exercise, I only considered research articles, books and book chapters as scholarly output. In 2017-18, the BHU faculty produced a total of 3,888 scholarly works while the JNU faculty produced 1,454. When this figure is scaled by the number of faculty members at the institution in question, BHU produced an average of 2.68 scholarly works per faculty member while JNU produced 2.43. Of course, graduate students also participate in the publication process. And if we take into account that the number of graduate students in BHU is more than in JNU, the difference would be even tinier. 

Apart from these three metrics, JNU also significantly outperforms BHU when it comes to gender parity in student and faculty populations. 

However, as I mentioned earlier, the purpose of this exercise is not to demonstrate which university does a better job of using taxpayer funds. That would entail a more thorough analysis, a challenge beyond the scope of this article. I only wanted to demonstrate that the accusations hurled at JNU has almost no basis at all. As I have shown above, JNU is no worse, or better, than BHU on any of the key metrics, yet only one of them faces flak. In India’s contemporary political discourse, there seems to be no common ground between the Right and the Left. The Right should understand, however, that selectively bullying a university based on misinformation neither elevates the civility of our discourse nor gets their point across.