Burdwan, March 31: Made to wait for their exam results for nine months, the anger of students of Burdwan University have spilled onto the streets.
Around 500 students, who took the Part II exams in June last year, today took out a 3km procession and demonstrated near the varsity's administrative building demanding immediate publication of the results.
About 80,000 students from 127 affiliated colleges in Burdwan, Birbhum, Bankura and Hooghly are yet to get their Part II undergraduate results.
The 500-odd protesters demanded that they be allowed to meet the vice-chancellor, Smriti Kumar Sarkar. The students were stopped from entering the campus by a section of members of the Trinamul Chhatra Parishad-controlled union at Burdwan University who asked the guards to close the gates.
The agitators squatted on the road outside the varsity gate. Nearly two hours later, the VC agreed to meet five representatives from among the examinees.
"But when we submitted a memorandum, he told us to disclose our identities in writing, including our names and the colleges we study in. He asked us to submit the memorandum to his secretary. We did so," said an examinee from Hooghly Mohsin College.
A professor of Burdwan University today said it took about three months to publish undergraduate and postgraduate results.
Sources in the institution, however, said it took three months alone for the examiners to check the papers, following which they were submitted to the controller of examinations for tabulation. The university sent the tabulation sheets to a private agency - Computer Maintenance Corporation (CMC) - in the first week of October for preparation of marksheets.
CMC sent the draft marksheets to the controller of exams for scrutiny in December-January. In February, the university gave the go-ahead to the agency to prepare the final marksheets. CMC, however, is yet to submit them.
Contacted over phone, the managing director of CMC, Chanchal Majumdar, said he was busy and could not speak immediately. His phone was found switched off later.
In a notification issued on March 25, Burdwan University has deferred the Part III exams, scheduled to begin on April 28, till further notice.
VC Sarkar said a three-member committee had been set up to find out who was responsible for the delay in the publication of the results. The committee will also probe why there were mistakes in the Part-I marksheets, which were published in February. He said the results would be announced "as soon as possible".
A senior Burdwan University official said there had been delays at every step.
Around 34,000 Part I students are also awaiting their results because the marksheets that were published in February were riddled with mistakes and had to be withdrawn. The results, which were published after seven months, had mistakes such as students who had failed were marked as qualified. Moreover, the word examination on the marksheet was misspelt as "examintaion".
Burdwan University redistributed rectified marksheets among 60 per cent of the students within a fortnight.
The mistakes in the Part I results prompted the Part II students to launch their agitation.
Part II examinees had held similar demonstrations yesterday too. Students' representatives from Jadavpur University, Presidency University and Rabindra Bharati University also participated in the agitation in front of the Burdwan University gate today.
"The vice-chancellor had promised us that the results would be published within a week. We told him that the results should be fault-free. More than 80,000 students have been suffering because of the inordinate delay in the publication of the results," said Abhijit Mukherjee, a commerce student from Hooghly Mohsin College.
Suchismita Sen, a student from Jadavpur University who walked with the students of Burdwan University, said: "We are here to share the agony of our friends. If the results are not published within a week, we shall go for a greater movement."
