Covid +ve girl appears for PG exams from ICU bed

Nagpur: As Nagpur University ignored the demand of colleges and students to defer their postgraduate examinations, a girl was forced to appear for her last paper despite being Covid-19 positive at the time from the hospital’s ICU. She was kept beside the bed of her mother, who was serious and later succumbed to mucor-fibrosis a couple of days back.
NU had entrusted its affiliated colleges and departments to hold the exams of PG, external, failure, and diploma students at their level. Even for some undergraduate courses where the number of examinees is below 100, exams would be conducted by the colleges. NU had directed them to schedule the paper from May 5 to 20. It was only after TOI and other newspapers took up the issue the university postponed its PG exams on Friday, but by just ten days.
The girl, studying in one of the city’s autonomous colleges, tested positive on April 22 after her mother contracted the virus. Subsequently, all of them, including her father and brother too, tested positive. As the condition of her and mother deteriorated, both were admitted to a hospital. While she was kept on an oxygenated bed, her mother was put in ICU.
Next day, her papers started and she was forced to appear from the hospital. She also emailed the college authorities about deferring her exam citing her disease as she wasn’t in a position to solve the paper on mobile.
“After many of my classmates turned positive and witnessed a spate of deaths in their families, we, under the banner of ‘The Platform’ and ‘Human Rights Protection Forum (HRPF)’, had written to college authorities for postponing the exams at least by a month. But they said the NU administration was unwilling to extend dates,” the girl told TOI.
The college authorities provided an option to them to appear along with the repeaters, but the students denied stating that it would affect their performance. “I somehow appeared in the exam despite being extremely weak and suffering from severe body pain, which is a normal sign of Covid. Probably due to tension and exertion, I was shifted to ICU from where I appeared for the last paper. I couldn’t perform well due to all these problems,” she said.
The girl and her mother recovered by May first week and went back home, but the latter suffered from post-Covid complications and succumbed. “Even my brother studying engineering is also appearing in an online college practical exam while performing last rituals of our mother. In fact, many students from our college are suffering from similar plights. My friend’s father passed away recently due to Covid and she’s also positive, but colleges are unrelenting and forcing them to appear in exams,” the girl said.
According to her other classmates, they had rushed a letter to chief minister Uddhav Thackeray, higher education minister Uday Samant and other authorities to reschedule their exams, but received no response. “We had also tweeted our demands to the authorities concerned, but our pleas fell on deaf ears,” they told TOI.