Hyderabad University's students on indefinite hunger strike to protest against cut-off norm for admissions

Students' Union 2019-20 of Hyderabad University has condemned the varsity's 'autocratic' decision to adopt 'Brahminical' centralised minimum mark criteria in the entrance examination, for MPhil and PhD interviews, and decided to go on an indefinite hunger strike to protest against it.

Hyderabad (Telangana): The Students' Union 2019-20 of Hyderabad University has condemned the varsity's 'autocratic' decision to adopt 'Brahminical' centralised minimum mark criteria in the entrance examination, for MPhil and PhD interviews, and decided to go on an indefinite hunger strike to protest against it.

In a statement, Abhishek Nandan, President, Students' Union 2019-20 said that this will result in turning the university as an inaccessible space for students who do not belong to the privileged sections.

"Students' Union 2019-20 strongly condemns this attitude and absolutely rejects the adoption of the discriminatory qualifying criteria. We demand that candidates should be called in 1:6 proportions and no seat shall remain vacant," he said.

The University of Hyderabad declared the entrance examination result of the year 2020-2021 on October 16. As per Nandan, 71 seats were left vacant of which 64 belong to reserved categories.

"No candidate has been shortlisted for interview in three departments. In most of the departments the numbers of shortlisted candidates are only near to or slightly more than the number of vacant seats available in those departments," he said.

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Nandan said the Students' Union pointed out this issue in advance and has represented giving the detail of how discriminatory the minimum mark criteria is.

"However, the Vice-Chancellor maintained a deaf ear to this and refused to meet the Union representatives. The Students' Union has thus been forced to call for a protest and is on strike at admin block from October 17 morning onwards demanding the revocation of this Brahminical minimum marks criteria and the reimplementation of 1:6 criteria where the number of candidates shortlisted will be six times of the total vacant seats," he said.

He added the protest will not be called back as long as this criterion is maintained.

"The Union is decided to have an indefinite strike on this. University of Hyderabad entrance results are out and what we can see is the clear violation of the UGC norms and subversion of the reservation policy in the shortlisting procedure," he stated further.

ANI