Students protesting poor results ‘manhandled’

Tribune News service

Shimla, August 31

ABVP activists, including a large number of girls, protesting against the poor results were beaten up by the police on the HPU campus today. The students accused officials of using abusive language against them.

“The activists held a demonstration, raised slogans against the university authorities and marched from the Summerhill Chowk to the Vice-Chancellor’s office to express their anger over the result in which only 500 out of 29,000 undergraduate students of various colleges had passed, but the police resorted to lathicharge. Even the girls were not spared,” said president and secretary of the campus unit of ABVP Gaurav Attri and Ankit Jamwal.

The party leaders alleged that the entire episode had been recorded in CCTV cameras. They threatened to take the issue to the Women Commission and the Human Rights Commission.

“We were going to meet the Controller of Examination to apprise him of the problems being faced by students, but the police stopped us and resorted to force. A number of students, including Prashant, Pradeep, Gaurav, Hema, Ankita and Amit, suffered injuries,” the ABVP leaders said. “The police also hurled abuses at the students,” they added.

Later, they met the Controller of Examination saying the pass percentage was abysmally low at 2 per cent, while 98 per cent students, including the toppers of classes X and XII had failed, which was unbelievable. Gaurav said the Controller of Examination had asked the students not to fill in re-appear forms, which was their victory.

“Ever since the Rashtriya Uchchatar Shiksha Abhiyan (RUSA) was implemented in haste by HPU for undergraduate courses (from the 2013-14 session), the students have been facing one or the other problem,” SFI campus president Noval Thakur said.

The move was opposed by the students as well as the college teachers as stakeholders were not taken into confidence and no counselling of teachers was done to educate them about the new system.

The software which was of foremost importance was not developed on time, no guidance was given to the teachers and the students about the choice of subjects under the Choice Based Credit System (CBCS), grading system was not explained to the teachers and as a consequence, the result of the first semester could not be declared even after the examination of the third semester. The students protested against RUSA for more than one year and even the teachers supported them as the government failed to recruit to fill 1,500 posts of teacher required to cope with the increased workload.

The examination wing of the HPU, reeling under staff shortage, worked overtime to declare the results, but the students encountered another problem of rejection at universities outside the state. They were told that the subjects they had opted for under the CBCS did not meet the condition for admission as per their curriculum.