E-Paper
FTII students protest as I&B minister Anurag Thakur visits campus
PUNE Students of the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) held a silent protest on Thursday when the minister of information and broadcasting Anurag Thakur visited the campus
PUNE Students of the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) held a silent protest on Thursday when the minister of information and broadcasting Anurag Thakur visited the campus. The students met Thakur and put forward their issues such as the lack of infrastructure, academic clashes, inadequate representation in the academic council, the merger of FTII with National Film Development Corporation of India (NFDC) and fee hike.
Thakur said, “The FTII is a prestigious institute and post Covid-19, we want to offer students better collaborations with international institutes. Now that classes have opened up, we want the students not only to be job seekers but also entrepreneurs, which is what we discussed in the meeting.”
However, Avanti Basargekar, president, FTII students’ association, felt that the minister was dismissive in his manner and not at all forthcoming. “He asked us to explain the importance of the issues that we had raised such as infrastructure, academic clashes where the FTII cannot accommodate so many batches together, no representation in the academic council, our voice not being heard, the fee hike and the impact on this space.”
Samadrita Ghosh, general secretary from the FTII students’ association, said, “There is no attempt to bridge the gap that has been created in two years. Most of the 2020 batch has been online and after offline classes began, the students have not been given the classes they were supposed to be in. When we raised this issue, the administration was totally apathetic when they should have been ready to accommodate the new batches and us too but nothing is ready and there is no communication.”
