Around 150 students of Jamshedpur Cooperative College, a constituent unit of Kolhan University, among those with poor attendance, protest before chief minister Raghubar Das's Agrico residence-cum-office on Wednesday, demanding they be allowed to sit in the varsity exams (UG and PG) next month.
The students also submitted a memorandum to Maninder Choudhary, officer on special duty at the CM's Jamshedpur residence, seeking Raghubar Das's intervention to help them answer their exams despite their paltry attendance.
Though Kolhan varsity decreed 75 per cent attendance as an eligibility cut-off for a student to answer exams, Jamshedpur Cooperative College staff council, possibly to appease its 7,000-plus-strong student community, earlier slashed it to 70 per cent. But, as around 1,000 students did not manage even 70 per cent, some 150 of them felt justified in knocking on the chief minister's door to be allowed to write their papers. "The college reduced our attendance cap, but that's not enough. We want the chief minister to take action," MCom student Mehul Pathak said.
This impunity seems to be endemic. Around 200 students of Jamshedpur Workers' College, Mango, also protested on campus for two hours on Tuesday on the same issue.
Text by Antara Bose; picture by Bhola Prasad