BENGALURU: Around 50 Postgraduate Common Entrance Test (PGCET) applicants from Scheduled Castes (SCs) congregated at the Karnataka Examinations Authority (KEA) office in Bengaluru on Friday, after the caste statuses in their applications were automatically changed to General. The alleged error was made across multiple courses, and not limited to any one specific course.
“We sat for our PGCET examinations for the respective courses and received verification slips with our correct category, but in our mock allotment results, we found that our category (SC) to have been abruptly changed General Merit (GM),” said 21-year-old Maha Sonu, one of the protesters vying for a Master of Computer Applications (MCA) seat.
Sonu said that apart from the category change, the annual family salary inputs for all the protesting students were allegedly changed to Rs 8 lakhs per annum. “KEA office bearers told us that we should have updated our categories to SC-A, SC-B, or SC-C (all three are SC sub-categories as per the state government’s reservation system). Many students were not aware of this, and the change of our inputs – if that can be deemed as the appropriate course of action – should have come before this, and not during the mock allotments,” he added.
KEA executive director H Prasanna told TNIE that “There are no seats under the general SC category. Seats are available under SC-A, SC-B and SC-C categories. These students did not submit their new caste certificates even after six months. Now, after the results have been announced, they are demanding that the new caste certificates be accepted and their category be changed.”
Protesting students alleged that not only did KEA officials refuse to provide any explanation beyond the aforementioned one, but also behaved rudely with the students at the KEA office, threatening to disbar them entirely by dismissing them of even the GM category. “After they threatened to disbar us, the protesting students got scared and lost steam, and many started retreating, defeated. They dismissed us outright, and challenged us to file a court complaint if we wished to do so,” a student said.
