Students threaten immolation, hurt in police baton charge

Rohtak, Mar 26 (UNI) Several of protesters, including some girls, sustained minor injuries in the lathi charge when police tried to disperse hundreds of students from across the state staging a dharna to press for a ban on admissions to the Diploma in Education (D.ED) Courses.

Hundreds of D.ED students currently undergoing the D.ED course across the state, converged here today and threatened to resort to self-immolation, if more admissions were made into the course which lacked job opportunities.

Addressing the protesters at the local Jat Education Institute Ground, student leaders lashed out at the Hooda government for granting permission to several private educational institutions to run the D.ED course and questioned the logic of further admissions to the course when nearly 27000 Diploma holders in the course were already in the queue for employment.

Demanding ban on admissions to D.ED course for the 2008-10 batch in all the educational institutions in the state, the Diploma holders threatended that they would start hunger strike and were ready to commit self-immolation, if the government allowed admissions to D.ED course in the year 2008.

They also marched towards the local residence of chief minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda but were stopped by police at the government college gate, where they submitted a memorandum of their demands to Capt. Ahastar Singh, political secretary to the chief minister.

When they staged a dharna insisting on immediate action on their memorandum, the police resorted to lathi-charges to disperse them, hurting more than twenty of them.

UNI XC JN MMS1929