An online petition has been started on Change.org seeking a ban on Sri Chaitanya and Narayana junior colleges in the state of Telangana.
The two institutes are notorious in the Telugu states of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh for the harsh conditions that they put their students through. The petition has garnered 250 signatures in just two days.
Started by the Telangana Vidyarthi Vedika (TVV), the petition is addressed to state Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao and Deputy CM and Education Minister Kadiyam Srihari.
A letter along with the petition, which is addressed to the parents of students, states, “You always strive to get a good education for your children to ensure a better future. You enrol your children into big corporate colleges like Sri Chaitanya and Narayana, because you think they are good by looking at their advertisements about their ranks in competitive exams. However, these corporate colleges are killing your children for the ranks.”
The two institutes witness several student suicides each year as the results are announced. The students, especially those who live in hostels, have an unforgiving regime, as they made to follow a rigorous time schedule with no time for rest.
Stating that a large majority of students who study in these institutes are never able to crack competitive exams, the online petition claimed that “their idea of a ‘good’ education itself is problematic.”
“Sri Chaitanya and Narayana advertise good infrastructure which they have in one or two main branches, but they have suffocating classrooms with no proper lighting in their smaller branches. They make a huge number of students sit in those cramped classrooms and have no labs for practicals. They make students study for 16 hours in a day, without proper sleep. Students have to go through mental trauma and psychological unrest that pushes them to suicide,” the petition states.
It also claims that 47 students killed themselves in 2017 from these two institutes alone.
“Sri Chaitanya and Narayana hostels are mere jails, rather than academic spaces. Nearly 18 students stay in a small room, with no right to question about the food. Students have to get up by 4 am and study till 11 pm without holiday. The sexual harassment which girl students have to go through is also countless,” the petition claims.
Faced with several student suicides, the then united Andhra government had appointed the Prof Nirada Reddy Committee, which suggested that the institutes must give the children time for rest and games, along with other activities.
Pointing out that Andhra’s Municipal Administration Minister P Narayana is the owner of the Narayana group of institutions, the petition claims that none of the committee’s recommendations were implemented.
TVV also said that the Telangana government should stick to its promise of free KG to PG education and implement it.
Many people who signed the online petition seemed to be former students of the institutes, who supported everything mentioned in the petition and narrated their own experiences as students there.
“I was a part of this inhuman corporate college and they don’t treat people as humans. Also, the parents should understand the fact that getting ranks is not the ultimate thing in a student’s life,” one user wrote.
“These children should not be treated as tools to earn enormous profits for institutions and political parties, and certainly not at the cost their psychological, emotional and physical well-being,” another user added.
A link to the petition can be found here.