The University of Delhi (DU) is likely to extend its reservation policy for single girl children to postgraduate courses from the next academic session 2025-26. This is after a successful reservation policy in undergraduate programs during the 2024-25 academic year saw 764 students getting admitted across 69 affiliated colleges.

The proposal to include postgraduate courses under this initiative will be discussed in an upcoming academic council meeting. If approved, the new policy will also apply to all 77 doctoral programmes offered by the university. Currently, postgraduate admissions at DU are conducted through the Common University Entrance Test (CUET) and allocated via the Common Seat Allocation System (CSAS).

This move has come at a time when the competition for postgraduate seats at the university has been increasing. In the 2023-24 admission cycle, DU had received more than 90,000 applications for just 13,500 PG seats. This reservation policy is introduced with the aim of promoting gender inclusivity and providing opportunities for women to pursue higher education in line with national efforts towards empowering single girl children through educational initiatives.

Apart from this new reservation policy, DU continues to allocate seats for other special categories, including sports, persons with disabilities (PwD), children and widows of armed forces personnel (CW), and orphaned children. These measures reflect DU’s broader commitment to fostering diversity and inclusion across its academic programs.

Besides the initiatives by DU, the University Grants Commission, for instance, had in place several scholarships and fellowships to support the studies of single girl children. Some of the most prominent schemes include Swami Vivekananda Single Girl Child Fellowship for Research in Social Sciences, established in 2014-15 and later reformed in the form of Savitribai Jyotirao Phule Fellowship for Single Girl Child in 2022. The change had brought an extension of the fellowships to the non-social sciences disciplines, further promoting the equity of academia.

The fellowship is offered for PhD students and allows funding for five years or to the submission of a PhD thesis, whichever comes earlier. Junior Research Fellows (JRF) are provided with a monthly stipend of Rs 31,000 in the first two years. It increases to Rs 35,000 for the remaining period. In addition, contingency allowance of Rs 10,000 per year is available to humanities and social science students for the first two years, which then rises to Rs 20,500 per year. For science students, the contingency allowance is at Rs 12,000 per year and goes up to Rs 25,000 after two years. Crucially, there is no upper limit on the number of fellowships that are available each year, thus opening it up to everyone.

According to the UGC’s 2022-23 annual report, 187 female students availed of the fellowship in that academic year. From 2018 to 2023, a total of 1,117 single girl children received support under this scheme.

With the new policy at DU and the UGC’s continued efforts, the landscape of higher education in India is slowly changing to create better opportunities for single girl children, paving the way for greater gender parity and empowerment in academic and professional domains.