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SET candidates withdraw hunger strike after SPPU assures settlement
The students were protesting against iscrepancies in the correction of optical mark recognition (OMR) sheets.
The premises of Savitribai Phule Pune University (SPPU), for the past two days, had been clouded in protests as almost 30 candidates who had appeared for the State Eligibility Test (SET) this year on April 16, were bent on observing a hunger strike. The students had been protesting against an alleged injustice done to them by the varsity through discrepancies in the correction of optical mark recognition (OMR) sheets. In order to resolve the situation, the University has eventually given assurance of a settlement to the students, urging them to revoke the hunger strike.
The alleged technical errors in the OMR sheets resulted in almost 2500 candidates failing the test. All of them scored a zero on their tests for either not colouring the options correctly to signify the name of the paper, not colouring the options at all or for marking more than one option.
SPPU authorities, however, stated that they had previously mentioned that in case of incorrect markings on the papers, they will not be corrected. But, the candidates are perturbed that the regulation has been observed by the university selectively by correcting 12 OMR sheets despite having similar errors. Protesting against this, the candidates decided to observe a hunger strike on Tuesday to demand a manual check instead.
“The issue of injustice is that, while our papers have been disqualified, there are 12 other papers with almost the same incorrect markings that have been checked. This sort of non-uniformity or selective application of the University’s regulations is not fair and we will not tolerate it,” said Janata Dal (United) general secretary, Kuldeep Ambekar.
They, however, withdrew the hunger strike after the University gave a written settlement assurance on August 23. A complaint letter was submitted by them to the vice chancellor, who has set up a committee to look into the matter. The report prepared by the committee will be sent to the University Grants Commission (UGC) and after a thorough review, an action is to be expected within the next 45 days, the protesters said.
"We are not completely satisfied with the assurance yet, and will only be happy when all the students get the final reviewed results,” Ambekar added.
Ashwini Sawant, a SET candidate said, “We are all qualified students with good marks in the previous exams. I was sure about myself and was shocked to know the results. Only 3.92 % students have passed the exam and that’s impossible.”
Yogesh Thakur, from Jalna, added, “Not just the University, even the invigilators have not done their duty of informing us if there is an issue with the OMR sheets before signing them. In the Kolhapur centre, the distributed answer sheets were wrong for 6,680 students and they switched to manual checking. If it can happen there for so many students, then why not here?”
Many of the protesters also belonged to Gadchiroli, Kolhapur, Satara, Nagpur, Mumbai, Latur and Pune.
SPPU vice chancellor Nitin Karmalkar had previously stated that such errors are not to be expected from teachers and that the rehearsal tests are held to avoid them. If candidates make mistakes even after that, the university is not to be entirely responsible, he said.
