New Delhi, Oct. 29 -- A new attendance policy at a department of the prestigious Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, requires 200 MTech and first-year PhD students to spend at least 50 hours a week in departmental labs, with senior PhD scholars expected to match their advisors' 70-80-hour a week schedules, documents seen by HT show.

Students at the Department of Electronic Systems Engineering (ESE), who currently have no specified working hours and just need to mark attendance twice in a day, have called the policy an attempt to bring "corporate culture" of counting hours into academia, raising health, privacy, and surveillance concerns. The policy was introduced by department chair Mayank Shrivastava in an October 2 email.

On Octob...