814 Transgenders Enroll in IGNOU in Past 5 Years
At present, there are no transgender students studying in the Central Universities, except in IGNOU were total of 814 transgender students have been enrolled in the past five years.
Currently,there are no transgender students studying in the Central Universities, except in (IGNOU) where a total of 814 transgender students have been enrolled in the last 5 years. Also, the Central Universities of the country, which are directly under the administrative control of the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD), do not have any transgender recruited to the university staff.
IGNOU has also exempted the fees of transgender students for all its academic programmes. An announcement regarding the same was made at the 32nd convocation ceremony of IGNOU.
In April 2014, the Supreme Court of India delivered a landmark judgment and created a third gender status for transgenders. Justices A.K. Sikri and K.S. Radhakrishnan granted legal recognition to eunuchs or transgenders as ‘third gender’ and directed the central and state governments to treat them as educationally and socially backward classes for the purpose of the reservation.
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An announcement regarding the was made on June 02, 2017. Every year, IGNOU celebrates June 2nd in memory of the founding VC of IGNOU, Prof. G. Ram Reddy and invites renowned scholars and educationists to deliver a lecture on higher learning particularly in the Open & Distance Learning domain. As a part of celebrations, Prof. Y. Vaikuntam, former VC of Kakatiya University and Prof. M. Jagadeesh Kumar, VC of JNU delivered the lectures on ‘Education at the doorstep from correspondence courses to distance and digital learning’ and ‘Learning to Teach and Teaching to Learn’.
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Prof. Vaikuntam stressed that the government must spend 6% of GDP (Gross Domestic Product) on education. The government must figure out and come up with new strategies to address the challenges for the growth of education in the country. He also recollected his association with Prof. G. Ram Reddy as his student at OU or Osmania University. The concept of Open & Distance Learning in India gained momentum due to his untiring efforts. Prof. Vaikuntam termed Prof. G. Ram Reddy as an intellectual who predicted that Open and Distance Learning was one of the best solutions to improve the Gross Enrolment Ratio.
The officials paid homepage to Prof. G. Ram Reddy on the occasion.