HYDERABAD, Jan 26: Hundreds of students of Qasimabad Government College, Muslim College, Degree College, Degree Boys College and Ghazali College, Latifabad, staged separate protest demonstrations outside the Hyderabad Press Club and the office of the Zila Nazim at Civic Centre here on Saturday against the compulsory recovery Rs1,000 as computer fees.
Talking to newsmen they said that there were no computers in the colleges and hardly any computer teacher was available.
They said no computer classes had ever been held in the colleges and they had seen computers only in computer shops.
The students said that it was unjustified to charge computer fee of Rs1,000 from each student when the fees of all other the subjects were only Rs600.
They demanded that the recovery of computer fees should be stopped otherwise a large number of students will have to dropout.
The chairman of students action committee, Surhia Sindhi, has warned that if the decision to charge computer fee was not withdrawn by Jan 28, the students of Qasimabad Government College and Muslim College will stage hunger strike outside the office of the Zila Nazim on Jan 29, and will also block the roads.
He said that in Punjab and in the NWFP, the computer subject has been made an optional subject and therefore, there was no reason whatsoever to make it a compulsory subject in the intermediate level in the Sindh province, especially when no computers had been made available in the colleges and there was also acute shortage of computer teachers.
Meanwhile, talking to Dawn on telephone, the principal of Degree College, Latifabad, said there were only four computers in the college for 500 students and only one teacher.
He said that the computer examination would be held in the final year (Class XII) and that the computer lab was under process.
He said he has taken over the charge of the principal only on Jan 1, 2002, and he could not interfere in the policy matters.
SPLA: The Sindh Professors and Lecturers Association (SPLA) at an urgent meeting held here on Saturday under the chairmanship of Professor Liaquat Aziz, expressed grave concern over the mounting unrest among the students due to the compulsory introduction of computer subject in the colleges of Sindh.
The meeting was of the opinion that there was no legal or moral justification to charge Rs1,000 computer fee from the students in absence of the trained teachers and computer laboratories.
The meeting noted that the students had not been taught computer education in classes and therefore, asking the students to deposit computer fee along with their annual examination forms was simply out of the question.
The meeting pointed out that if the mandatory provision of depositing Rs1,000 computer fee was not withdrawn, over 100,000 students of the province would not be able to appear in the annual examinations.