Mumbai’s St Xavier’s College has been planning to adopt a shift system from the academic year 2025-26 to manage the space constraint on the campus. With increased combination subjects because of National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 and limited classrooms, the college struggles to accommodate lectures one after the other.
“As a result of increased combination subjects, the timetable is stretched and thus sometimes the students have to wait for a long period before attending the next lecture. We are actively working to reduce the combination subjects and have decided from this year to remove those which have less than ten students,” said Rajendra Shinde, the principal.
Xavier's structure being a heritage one, cannot make massive architectural improvements to allow more space and classes, hence the college plans to implement a shift system to fully utilise its facilities and campus.
“We have established a faculty committee that will be visiting various institutions that run in shifts this coming year. They will study the pattern in these institutions and maybe from next academic year, we will implement the system,” Shinde continued, adding that the campus anyways gets empty after 4 pm and thus the college can work this idea.
The college already utilises St Xavier’s School, which is located right behind it, to conduct lectures for some of the courses such as Bachelor of Account and Finance (BAF) and MSc (Big Data Analytics). Some Junior College batches including arts 11 and 12 will be held in the school. The PG Geology department has also shifted there.
