New Delhi: In June 2024, the National Testing Agency (NTA) found itself embroiled in controversies related to paper leaks for both the national entrance exam for medical education and the exam for entry-level teaching jobs in universities and admissions to PhD programmes.
A wave of protest erupted nationwide, sparked by widespread dissatisfaction with the NTA’s irregularities in conducting the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) and UGC-NET exams. Students in the capital became a part of this movement, questioning the government over NTA’s accountability, and demanding abolition of the organisation.
Jyoti Karki, an MA Russian student at the University of Delhi’s (DU) Department of Slavonic and Finno-Ugrian Studies and a member of Disha Student Organisation (DSO), a student activist group, said she felt “a deep sense of responsibility” to raise her voice against the NTA.
“DSO had designed the campaign to call out NTA’s negligence in holding entrance exams, which had led to question paper leaks and cancellation of entrances, causing distress to students,“ said Karki. “We had planned a protest on 9 August at Jantar Mantar to demand NTA’s revocation.”
To raise awareness for the upcoming protest and invite students to stand together in unity, she and her companion chose to write—as many generations before her had—slogans on a wall.
On 31 July, Karki and her companion went out in the night, searching the campus for an empty wall to write their message, as the university’s ‘wall of democracy’—the ‘official’ area for wall writing—was full of slogans from the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), the youth wing of India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.
This story was originally published in article-14.com. Read the full story here.
