The Essential Services Maintenance (ESMA) is an act of Parliament of India which was established to ensure the delivery of certain services, which if obstructed would affect the normal life of the people.[1] This include services like public transport (bus services), health services (doctors and hospitals).
“The issue got highlighted when a UGC notice announced the setting up of a working group to study the Delhi University Act in terms of its present relevance and also look at bringing teaching, learning, exams and evaluation in DU under ESMA” published The Hindu.
This definetly gained a lot of criticism by everybody who read about it, and later was given a clear sighted explanation.
There is no such proposal to bring Delhi University under ESMA. The suggestion to ban strikes in the examination services came from some affected students during the DUTA strike. We have examined it and are not going ahead with the suggestion. Kindly clarify to readers.
— R. Subrahmanyam (@subrahyd) October 20, 2018
We have neither put any restrictions nor intend to put any restrictions on “Freedom of Speech” in JNU, Delhi University or any other University.#HigherEducation @HRDMinistry
— Prakash Javadekar (@PrakashJavdekar) October 20, 2018
These were tweeted yesterday laying the structured clarification of what they meant.
Later it was made clear by the Minister and higher education secretary that there will be no such frictional restriction which will we imposed on freedom of speech in DU.
ESMA Clause (VIII) says that , anybody can be arrested for speaking out, ‘for instigation’, ‘without warrant’,” by Academics for Action and Development chairperson Aditya Narayan Misra who also added, “Clause (V) which states that such an Act shall be punishable with imprisonment for a term which may extend to one year.”
After these clauses were brought up to light, there was a whole chaos from Federation of Central University Teacher’s Associations.