Hyderabad: A meeting of Vice-Chancellors from various varsities from Telangana was held here at 11 a.m today in the Telangana State Council for Higher Education’s (TSCHE) office. The meeting was supposedly called to deliberate on issues of offline exams in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
However, despite appeals by various students with some even threatening to take their lives, the TSCHE council meeting did not deliberate on the issue of offline exams. Instead, they discussed the admissions for the coming academic year and the introduction of new courses in select colleges. Mr. Papi Reddy, the chairman of TSCHE informed Siasat.com that the meeting did not discuss the exam issue at all.
A day earlier, students across various colleges in Hyderabad were angry over the state government’s decision to conduct exams in an offline capacity worried that they may risk getting infected with the virus. The demand for conducting exams online or to scrap them completely was raised time and again.
In fact, a petition was also started by a third-year computer science student to either scrap the exams or hold them online has garnered more than 15,000 signatures from under graduate students. The petition, on www.change.org, was initiated by Fardeen Taj, a student of the Muffakham Jah College of Engineering & Technology.
It requested the Telangana Government and Osmania University’s decision making bodies to conduct their exams online, or to not go ahead with it due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
In his petition, Taj has expressed concerns over the delta variant of the COVID-19 virus which has already had a disastrous impact on young people. It also laments the fact that students are currently dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder owing to the demise of their family members and friends. Hence, conducting offline exams is ill-advised now, added his petition.
A Public Interest Litigation (PIL) by Mr. Venkat Balmoor, State President of the National Student Union of India (NSUI) is to be filed tomorrow in the High Court at Hyderabad against all colleges in Telangana in the hopes of hindering offline exams during the COVID-19 pandemic.