Eflu students have been running a series of protests against the show-cause notices allegedly being issued to a few students.
And on Thursday night, at Lamakaan, other student groups organised an event including a stand-up comedy act in a show of support to their counterparts at Eflu.
Protesting against the new UGC guidelines (which are paving way for biometric devices to track students in hostels and classrooms) and the presence of cameras on campus —there’s even rumours of police booths on campuses — students fear that in the garb of providing safety, authorities are controlling their lives and that they would be “prison inmates” rather than students.
“Privacy is definitely a sensitive issue and UGC is not in a position to tell me what to do. Moreover, there’s no assurance about where these footages are going. There’s a CCTV camera right outside our washroom!” says Shreevidya, a student from Tata Institute of Social Sciences, at the Lamakaan event.
Gopala Krishna, who organised the event at Lamakaan, surprisingly is not a student. “But I have made a lot of friends from these institutions and I can see that they are all angry because of the rules that are being forced on them. So that’s why I decided to create this platform where students can voice their opinions,” he says.
The take away from the evening protest was that the students needed to stand up against these guidelines.
With a street play and poetry reading session lined up, Arjab Sarkar from Eflu said, “The management has deterred the appointment of a student union for almost two months now, and their ambiguous answers are tiring us. We will continue this for at least a week until action is taken.”
