Sample this: 208 girls enrolled for BCom Honours in evening colleges in 2003-04 as against 1,276 boys. The same year, 20,146 girls were enrolled in BCom Honours in ‘regular’ (read day) colleges — almost three-times that of 8,813 male students (see box).

Dr Satyender Kumar, principal of Satyawati College, says evening colleges are not the first choice for girl students. “Though we have classes till 8.30 pm, students do not want to stay beyond 6 pm,” he says. “There is a sense of insecurity among students, especially girls. And this is heightened by an inadequate transport system and rising crime graph.”

Take Anshul Sinha, for instance. The first-year Commerce student at Zakir Hussain Evening College stays as a paying guest in Maurice Nagar. For security reasons, she moves about in a group after classes that run till 7.30 pm. She has an advantage of a Metro line to travel to and from college. Many of her friends, she says, do not enjoy that facility.

Limited option

Set up in the early sixties to facilitate education for working professionals, evening colleges, with limited number of courses (they offer no Science courses) and poor infrastructure, today attract students who have nowhere else to go. “With rising cut-off marks, students who cannot match 90-percenters come to us,” says Dr GP Agarwal, principal of Shyam Lal College. “Since we run in the evenings, we cannot even offer extra-curricular activities to our students.”

The situation, Agarwal says, was made worse after DU’s School of Open Learning opened shop, for more students drifted towards its correspondence courses. Then comes the “tag”: “You can call us the second-shift colleges. The very term ‘Evening’ is derogatory. It would be better if DU could do away with the tag.”

Dyal Singh College principal Dr Deepak Malhotra, though, has a different take. Apart from the conventional courses, his college offers vocational degrees and diplomas in areas like Tourism and Travel Management, and Art and Culture. “Most evening colleges have stuck to the conventional path that has not worked for them,” Malhotra says. “With changing times, we have adapted well. Of 1,425 students here, more than 550 are girls. Things can change with a little initiative.”

Most evening college principals would, however, disagree. Sri Aurobindo College principal Dr Bimlesh Yadav says, “The hard fact is evening colleges are not viable given the available infrastructure, courses and transport. DU must think about turning us into day colleges.”