Violence mars DU admissions

NEW DELHI: The fortnight long admission procedure at the Delhi University had a sad ending on Friday when a group of more than 100 students clashed with the police while protesting outside the  St. Stephens College.

The students, mostly belonging to Akhil Bharatiya Vidhyarthi Parishad (ABVP), the student body affiliated to BJP, were protesting against the 10 per cent decline in seats for students of general category.

Though St. Stephens College had reserved 50 per cent seats for general category students till last year, a change in policy was implemented during this academic year by bringing down the general category seats to 40 per cent.

The college also has 40 percent reservation for Christians, 15 per cent for scheduled caste and scheduled tribe and 5 per cent for students of sports category.

Soon after the protesters started to gather outside the college gate around 2:30 pm, police came in to block the odd 100 students from going inside the college.

The group was headed by Vikas Dahiya, vice president of Delhi University Students' Union, who was detained by the police for several hours before being let-off. Amongst other students who were detained after the scuffle were Kapil Garg, general secretary ABVP, Rakesh Sharma, Anand Bhatti and Dharmendra.

"We have detained five people for disrupting work outside the college but these people would soon be released after a warning," said Devesh Kumar, deputy commissioner of police. "We managed to stop these students from entering the college premises and disrupt work," he added.

Kumar said  the students were later allowed to give a memorandum against the quota decision to the vice-chancellor of DU.

Meanwhile, on the last day of the admission  at the Delhi University, students thronged at the college premises desperately trying to fill-in admission forms for the current session.

The university staff sold more than 1.20 lakh application forms to students, which is 20 per cent more than the total number of forms that was sold last year. There are around 35,000 seats in the 72 colleges that form the Delhi University.

As always a good number of students this year too were from Bihar, UP, north eastern parts of the country.