Hyderabad, August 31: Students from Telangana are arm-twisting colleges and universities to engage only teachers and lecturers from Telangana to evaluate their answer-sheets as they expect them to be lenient.
Pro-Telangana students on Saturday even chased away teachers and lecturers hailing from Andhra and Rayalaseema who had come to evaluate answer-sheets of BEd and BA.
An internal report of the Osmania University, which is investigating incidents of attacks on non-Telangana teachers and lecturers, suggests that students with political affiliation were misusing the Telangana sentiment to force the university to pass all students irrespective of how they fared in exams. They were also forcing the administration to postpone exams by organising agitations over the Telangana issue.
“We, including three lady teachers, had gone to OU to evaluate BEd and BA exam answer-sheets. A group of students surrounded us and started raising anti-Andhra and pro-Telangana slogans. They started assaulting us. They did not want us to check their answer-sheets because we do not belong to Telangana. When we said we have to complete the task given to us, they chased us away,” Subba Rao, one of the teachers, said on Monday. The incident prompted Governor E S L Narasimhan to seek a report from the OU vice-chancellor.
OU coordinator Prof B S Rao said the administration was trying to address the issue. “We are trying to settle the issue as amicably as possible without attributing motives,” Prof Rao said.
However, the Osmania University Student’s Joint Action Committee, led by Praveen Reddy and Ramesh Reddy, has demanded that all non-Telangana teachers be taken off duty of evaluation and the job be given only to Telangana teachers. “They are against Telangana students. Evaluation should be entrusted to Telangana teachers only,” Praveen Reddy said.
Over the past few days, job-seekers and aspirants appearing for interviews or exams are also being targeted. At the Mahatma Gandhi University at Nalgonda, members of the Telangana Student’s JAC tried to stop non-Telangana candidates from appearing for interviews for the posts of academic consultants held on Sunday and Monday.
Sources in the university said some students asked non-Telangana people not to go for the interviews. “When there was no response, they asked everyone’s name and native place and forced some people to leave,” an official said. However, Mahatma Gandhi University Registrar Dr K Muthyam Reddy said he did not receive any such complaint from any candidate.
-Agencies