Nationwide Student Strike on 4th July

As the institutions of public education are crumbling, Students’ Federation of India (SFI) gives a call to observe a strike by the students across the country.

In the last few weeks, the National Testing Agency (NTA) has once again demonstrated its incompetence and incapacity to conduct national level exams. Following a series of serious misconducts and discrepancies, the latest being the postponement of the NEET PG examination. First, the NEET-UG exam results declared on June 4 have been marred with complaints of transparency issues and paper leaks.

Following this, the UGC NET exam, which lakhs of students attended, was canceled post-exam due to reports of discrepancies and paper leak as well. Adding to this incompetence, the NTA also postponed the CSIR NET, originally scheduled in the next week of UGC NET. This delay only highlights the increasing lack of faith of NTA in its own functioning and existence. Furthermore, the National Board of Examination for Medical Sciences (NBE) which directly comes under the Ministry of Health, (Govt. of India) also has decided to postpone NEET-PG entrance exams at the last minute, citing episodes of paper leaks and irregularities. 

For years, lakhs of students across the country have raised concerns about how centralised examinations like CUET, NEET have encouraged increasing privatisation of education, breeding a culture of coaching centres which has made education inaccessible and unaffordable for the marginalised students. Under the garb of ‘One Nation, One Exam’, the entire examination system has collapsed and put the academic future of students at risk for an indefinite period.

As per a report by The Telegraph, The National Testing Agency handles 25 public exams with less than 25 permanent staff members, according to education domain experts, one of whom said the Centre had gambled with the exams by directing the agency “to bite more than it was intended to chew”.

The Centre’s lack of acknowledgement of NTA’s situation and the task it is loaded with is a blatant shifting of blame onto certain individuals and that’s why Ministry of Education has to be held accountable. This failure of NTA and the education ministry itself has to be attributed to the filling the government positions with members of RSS who are completely incompetent and incapable. 

The repeated failures of the NTA have created immense uncertainty, anxiety, and wasted the precious time, effort and the hard earned money of thousands of aspiring students. This blatant disregard for students’ futures demands a transparent and independent inquiry into the irregularities and a complete overhaul of the NTA and structural changes in the Education Ministry. 

Other than these issues and discrepancies in the higher education, we cannot forget the situation of other school education. The past decade under the BJP-led NDA regime saw a cut in budgetary allocations to the departments concerned, falling in the number of government schools, shortage of teachers, and a drop in gross enrolment ratio. Contrary to the Modi government’s promise of improving “access to education”, the reality is that “between 2018-19 and 2021-22, the total number of schools in India decreased by 61,885, dropping from 15,51,000 to 14,89,115. The most significant decline was observed in Central and State Government schools, accounting for 61,361 closures.The decrease in the number of government schools has been accompanies by a rise in the number of private schools, which makes accessibility a big question for the marginalised sections.

In this situation, the Central executive committee of the Students’ Federation of India (SFI) will observe nationwide Student Strike on 4th July, against the attack on education and democracy in the country. Students will boycott the classes and marches will be held in every state and national capital.

This Students ‘ Strike  will be raising it’s voice for:

1. The NTA system should be scrapped

2. The Union Education Minister must resign.

3. Students who gave the recent NET and NEET exam deserve compensation, which should be met by the union government.

4. Roll back the recently adopted system of mandatory NET score for PhD admissions.

5. Withdraw from the attempts to replace existing admission procedures with centralised entrance tests, thereby nurturing entrance mafias in the country.

6.From TISS Mumbai, IIT Bombay to Hyderabad Central University – Stop relentless witch-hunting of student activists and the Suppression of Free Expression and Democracy in Our Universities.

7.Stop the closure of schools

We appeal to the entire student community to join us for a *’Nationwide Strike’* on 4th July 2024

Sd/-

VP Sanu (President)

Mayukh Biswas (General Secretary)