Andhra Pradesh - Hyderabad

Engineering student ends life

HYDERABAD: Reportedly dejected over not being promoted to the third year, an engineering college student of Osmania University ended her life in the hostel room on Wednesday , the police said.

The ‘suicide’ of Naga Malleswari prompted the student organisations to intensify their ongoing agitation for abolition of detention system in colleges affiliated to O.U. After staging demonstration at the hostel for women on the OU campus, holding the university officials responsible for her death, they called for a bandh on OU campus on Thursday.

Malleswari remained in her Room No. 206 of new hostel building, while other classmates left for college in the morning. As she did not open the doors even after their return, inmates of the hostel alerted the security guards who forcibly opened the doors and found her body hanging from the ceiling.

“No suicide note was found in the room. She hanged herself with a ‘chunni,’ ” East Zone DCP T. Prabhakar Rao said. She had cleared all subjects of the second year but failed in one subject in the first year. As per rules, a student of second year would be promoted to third year only if all subjects of the first year are cleared. Malleswari’s classmates told reporters that she appeared to be dejected on account of this. Reports that private colleges affiliated to OU had relaxed their detention system further depressed her, they maintained.

As the news of her death spread, hundreds of students assembled at the hostel building. Activists of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad and the Students Federation of India staged a sit-in accusing the university officials of ‘killing innocent students with detention system’.

The police took 15 of the agitating students into preventive custody and let them off later in the night. Malleswari hailed from a poor Backward Class family of Tenali in Guntur.

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