All FIRs in-line with January 3 incidents: JNU

After an RTI suggested discrepancies in JNU administration's claims about vandalism in its server room on January 3, the university said all FIRs and other complaints filed with police are in-line with the incidents and do not deviate from facts.

New Delhi: The Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) on Wednesday said all FIRs and other complaints filed with police are in-line with the incidents that took place on January 3 and do not deviate from facts after an RTI suggested discrepancies in the varsity administration's claims about vandalism in its server room.

The university said its reply to the RTI was related to the specific location and questions sought by the applicant. It also clarified that the servers were damaged by "a group of miscreants" on January 4.

"As per the complaint filed by administration on January 3, 2020 about the incident in Centre for Information System (CIS) Data Centre, JNU has not claimed about damage to servers on that day. The RTI answers are correct and specific to the questions asked," the varsity said.

The RTI response also clearly states that servers are located at CIS Data Centre not in CIS office, which seems to be "conspicuously ignored while highlighting the matter in the media", it said.

"All FIRs and other complaints filed with police are in-line with the actual incidents that took place on January 3 and do not deviate from actual facts," it said.

The JNU administration reiterates that a group of masked students came to CIS Data Centre premises on January 3 and forcibly evicted the technical staff, switched off the power supply, locked the premises and squatted in front of the main entrance to the CIS Data Centre without providing any access to the centre, the varsity said.

Before evicting the technical staff out of CIS Data Centre, the masked students forced the technical staff to shutdown the systems, it said.

"This led to the discontinuation of the winter semester registration affecting thousands of students of the university. When CIS technical staff got access to CIS Data Centre on the morning of January 4 with the help of security, it took more than four hours to restore the entire system of CIS," it said.

Damage to the CIS Data Centre server room was caused on January 4 by "a group of miscreants" who broke open one of the door-windows of the CIS premises and entered the server room, it said.

Once inside, they turned off the servers and severely damaged the fibre optic cables, power supplies, broke the biometric systems inside the room, it added.

"The miscreants then started sloganeering and intimidated the technical staff from entering the server room," the varsity said.

Biometric systems and CCTV cameras at the server room were not vandalised in the first week of January, contrary to the claims made by the Jawaharlal Nehru University administration that students had destroyed them on January 3, the varsity has said in an RTI reply.

The reply to the RTI filed by Saurav Das, a member of the National Campaign for People's Right to Information (NCPRI), under "life and liberty" clause, said the main server of JNU at the Centre for Information System (CIS) was shut down on January 3 and had gone down the next day "due to power supply disruption".