Aditya Thackeray seeks PM intervention on exams

Demands postponement of physical and online exams including entrance exams

@hepzia

Mumbai: Aditya Thackeray, the founder of Yuva Sena, sought the intervention of the prime minister Narendra Modi to postpone all physical and online higher education examinations of professional courses including entrance exams, to prevent the spike of Covid-19 pandemic.

Yuva Sena has already filed a petition in the Supreme Court on this issue, which is awaiting a judgement even as the University Grants Commission (UGC) is persistent on conducting exams and universities across the country are already into scheduling exams. The Center and the state have been at loggerheads against each other on the issue of taking higher education exams with Maharashtra strongly insisting that conditions were not conducive to conduct exams in the state due to pandemic.

The union government has insisted on exams and even refuses to postpone NEET and JEE entrance exams scheduled later in September despite sustained protests and twitter campaigns. In a letter to the PM, Thackeray pointed out to the fact that Covid cases had spiked wherever in the world the educational institutions had opened up. He also drew attention to the fact that for non-professional courses, only 10 per cent of the assessment process were pending and hence could be passed with any university-devised marking system.

Also Read: Construction work fails to take off despite workers back in the city

Thackeray also highlighted how even conducting a single exam involved huge apparatus including teaching and non-teaching staff apart from the student community and with most students staying jointly with parents and grandfathers, any spread of infection could prove fatal. He also informed that Maharashtra was already considering starting the academic year from January 2021 to avoid students losing out their academic year.

Maharashtra has the highest number of Covid cases in India with 1,68,126 active cases and 11015 new detected cases, in the state as on August 24. Transportation services are yet to be fully opened up in state and Maharashtra has insisted on retaining electronic passes system for allowing travelling overriding the Center’s decision to allow free movement of goods and services. The state had issued 7,763,267 E-passes for travel till August 18.