Disclaimer: The author of this article wishes to remain anonymous due to obvious reasons.
Amity Law School Delhi, affiliated to Guru Gobind Singh University has ended up in yet another controversy. This time, over the detention of students apparently due to a shortage in attendance.
Just last year, Sushant Rohilla, a meritorious student of the college had committed suicide for being debarred from appearing in the sixth-semester examinations over a shortage of attendance.
Protests arose from the student community challenging the arbitrary attendance rules of the college back then.
The case for the same is still pending in the Delhi High Court.
But it appears that the students at ALSD have become habitual of challenging the college’s capricious attendance rules.
What is the fuss all about?
The attendance to be maintained has always been 66% according to the BCI Rules. However, the volatility in calculating the same has been a matter of distress for most students.
Till the final orders detaining students from all semesters separately were given out, the calculation of attendance and the criteria wasn’t clear to students which led to larger enragement among them and the parent community.
How is the attendance maintained? How are OD’s calculated? Why are medicals given no regard? These questions were left unanswered.
The transparency lacks when the attendance available to students is different from what ends up being.
Almost 100 students had been debarred in the ninth semester (the final year in college) which was finally reduced to 63 after parents had come to the college and demanded a re-check of the attendances of students.
The college was filled with students and their parents, students shouting that “the bottom line is that all this is very arbitrary”.
The fact that re-checking led to so many changes is self-explanatory of how the attendance policy is being carried out in the college.
Also Read: Attendance Over The Value Of A Life That Could Have Been? #JusticeForSushant
The students took the matter to Court
Writ petitions were filed by the students, which were heard before the bench of Justice Indermeet Kaur of the Delhi High Court.
As per the directions of Delhi High Court which approved the Office Order of the University it stated: “All detained students are provisionally allowed to appear in all regular papers of the semester end examinations subject to their undertaking as per the office order.”
All students now need to carry their ID cards and sign the undertaking available with the Centre Superintendent of GGSIPU at the respective examination center.
This comes as a sigh of relief but only after the students had been through a lot of stress just before exams.
Also, the exams start today and the notification has come just yesterday leaving the students hanging until the very last moment.
Is attendance instilling fear in students?
The debate over shall attendance be kept above a student’s caliber or even life still continues.
Professors want students to attend all classes but the students wish to have some freedom of choice.
A very frequent argument is “why should I be punished over something I am paying for?” Especially when I am not being heard and taken action against arbitrarily?
Also, amusingly no student of the final year had been debarred in the previous years, then why now? In fact, there is fear among college students and they have started going to college surely more than any time now.
The strength can be compared to previous years and it would be more especially after what happened last year.
So is that what the college demands? Shall students enter the classrooms fearing for attendances? Fearing of getting debarred? Fearing for their lives?
That is I believe the exact opposite of a healthy classroom environment. It is a place where a student comes to gain knowledge out of will, not fear.
Image Credits: Google Images
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