MUMBAI, March 10: The state government is going ahead with the HSC examinations in the state tomorrow ignoring threats of disruption from the striking non-teaching staff. A last-ditch attempt by the chief minister to avert the strike was rejected by the Maharashtra College Non-teaching Staff Federation leader R B Singh late in the evening. Singh said the federation members would stop examiners from entering examination centres and would court arrest if prevented from doing so.While the education department has geared up to conduct the examination with the help of school staff, desperate last-minute measures of shifting examination centres from colleges to schools in some areas have left the students utterly confused. Heavy police bandobast has also been made at the centres where trouble is anticipated.
Many colleges in the city today were swarming with anxious students who had not received their hall tickets. ``The exams start tomorrow and we still have not got our hall tickets. We are here sincemorning, but the police are not even allowing us in,'' a student of Somaiya College said. According to reports received late this evening, a few colleges in the city distributed blank hall tickets to the students with an assurance that the college identity cards would be enough to gain entry into the examination hall. In some other colleges students were being asked to collect signed statements from their principals.
The office of The Indian Express was also flooded with frantic calls from students of Ruia, Ruparel, Podar and other colleges wanting to know where would they get their hall tickets.
Officials at the HSC Board, however, maintained that the hall tickets had been distributed to almost all the students. ``In case the students do not get the tickets, they can call on phone number 4093 481 for assistance,'' an official said. However, a majority of students said that this information was not available at their colleges.
The situation was tense in the suburban colleges of Dombivli, Kalyanand Ulhasnagar too as anxious students gathered seeking information about the new centres. Shalini Khubchandani, a commerce student at the R K Talreja College, Ulhasnagar stood in a serpentine queue for three hours to get her hall ticket. ``I should be studying now...but look what Iam doing,'' she told Express Newsline.
In Birla College, Kalyan, where union leader R B Singh is the registrar, all lectures had been cancelled. Principal R Trivedi told this reporter, ``I had to open the college gate myself this morning,'' and added, ``with no non-teaching staff, the lecturers cannot take up all their work.'' A worried science student Santosh Tripude was running from one office to the other as the medium of instruction on his hall ticket was wrongly mentioned as Marathi. ``Had there been no strike I'd know whom to contact or what to do,'' he said. The staff did not seem to understand his difficulty. He said one employee told him: ``So what if you get the question paper in Marathi, you answer in English.''At Shantibai College, Ulhasnagar, students were asked to report at their respective centres early in the morning and collect their hall tickets.
At the Pendharkar College, principal V N Kulkarni was not clear about what he would do in the event of invigilators not turning up tomorrow. ``I am in touch with both the board and the police officials and am yet to receive clear guidelines about what I should do in such an eventuality,'' he said.
Meanwhile, the Federation of Non-Teaching Staff has reiterated that from tomorrow its members would take part in a `jail bharo andolan'. ``We'll stop the invigilators from entering the college and let the police arrest us in the process,'' Singh said. Speaking of the heavy response the agitation had got throughout, he showed a file full of telegrams coming from as far as Latur, Aurangabad, Udgir, Kolhapur, Buldhana, Pune and Nagpur asking him to continue the struggle till he does not get the GR accepting all the federation's demands. Other organisations in the city likethe Bombay University and College Teachers Union too have expressed solidarity with the non-teaching staff.
Copyright © 1998 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
