Voter awareness campaigns on campuses dip as students prepare for upcoming examination
Voters’ awareness campaigns by college students, like this one conducted in 2012 before the civic elections, are fewer this time around. REPRESENTATION PIC
With just a week to go for the BMC elections, most colleges in the city that would earlier conduct debates, discussions, poster making contests and many more activities to spread awareness about voter rights, are showing no interest in doing any of those. The reason: upcoming internal exams.
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"Earlier, students from our college used to give their personal effort to promote the voter awareness campaign by conducting debates, discussion and placing banners, but this year, unfortunately, the BMC elections have come at the time of their internal exams, so we don't want them to indulge in the awareness activity at the cost of their studies," said Vishnu Magare, principal, Kirti M. Doongursee College, Dadar. Magare said, "We have placed the banner and posters we have received from the state election commission, in our college campus."
Not in the mood
The principal of Siddharth College of Law, GV Rao said, "We are supporting the university in their efforts of creating voting awareness, but at a personal level we are not doing any activity, as we are busy with our own academic work."
Some colleges have done their bit, but with only a few weeks to go for the college internals, student unions are not in the mood to conduct the usual activities.
"Our student union wing has always been active during the time of elections. We used to go out in our respective area with the college group, this time though we have tried to visit some places for door-to-door awareness. But it is getting difficult to get students' participation due to the internals exam," said Sagar Gadekar, student union member from the Ambedkar College.
While the colleges actively avoid their usual programmes, Mumbai University still wants to give the awareness a fighting chance. On Monday, MU's NSS wing made an appeal to all colleges to give names of two students to participate and represent their college in the upcoming voter awareness campaign named '100%.'
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