Hyderabad: Intermediate students, in the backdrop of a student suicide due to alleged harassment by lecturers and junior college staff, bemoaned the lack of a dedicated student counsellor in each college as mandated by the Telangana State Board of Intermediate Education in 2019.
Even as the Board mandated that a counsellor be appointed from among lecturers, students said they would not open up to lecturers over fears of lack of confidentiality.
“Our exams begin from March 15 and our lecturers are mentally torturing and abusing us. They threaten to withhold hall tickets if we do not attend classes. We are self-studying and are understanding concepts from YouTube as lecturers are biased and only pay attention to first benchers. They encourage only a set of students and abuse others, by calling us failures and taunt us by saying we would never succeed,” a government junior college student said.
Another student said: “The lecturers do not clear our doubts and only want us to solve a paper every day. If we are unable to understand a concept, they do not solve our doubts but insult us in front of the whole class.”
A few students studying in private institutions said that even as their exams have started, 30 to 40 per cent of their syllabus is incomplete. “We have eight periods but are taught only for three. When we question them regarding incomplete syllabus, they blame low student strength. We are also bombarded with last-minute projects. There are no counsellors in the school and we desperately need one, as we are targeted by teachers if we complain to the principal.”
A psychologist, appointed by the Board last year, said that most of her callers were from private junior colleges, who feared exams and had suicidal tendencies. “The lecturers are abusive and only pressurise students mentally. There are 12 days left for the Intermediate exams to begin, yet our call lines are not open. There is no update on what the Board is planning,” the psychologist said.
Navin Mittal, the commissioner of Collegiate, Technical and Intermediate Education, said, “There are no official records from the junior colleges, who are violating these norms.”
