Transportation blues: 48K students still reach exam centres in Valley
SRINAGAR: The Jammu and Kashmir board Class 12 examinations for Kashmir Division started on Wednesday, a day after the commencement of class 10 exams.
Some 48,000 students across Kashmir participated in the examinations held across 433 centres across the Valley.
“Everything happened smoothly. There was no untoward incident of any kind. The attendance was 99.4 percent. Just a few hundred students were absent of the total 48,000 across the Valley,” said chairperson J&K Board of School Education (JKBOSE), Veena Pandita.
She said that divisional and district administrations had put in place measures for the smooth conduct of exams. “The board teams also visited most of the centers,” she said.
The students could be seen rushing to the examination centers in cars, on motorbikes and on foot, accompanied by their parents and friends. Owing to the shutdown in Kashmir after the scrapping of the state’s special status, there is very little public transport on the roads while shops and markets are closed.
Talib Gulzar, an arts student, left home two hours early to walk to his examination center in the Old City. “Thankfully, the paper was not that difficult. I had studied at home and manage to do 85 percent of my English paper,” he said.
Atiqa Bano, a resident of Dalgate who was waiting in her car along with her husband outside a government school at Raj Bagh, was very anxious. “It was my daughter’s first paper today. For three months they did not attend any classes. I wish she does well,” she said.
Another parent was aghast over conducting the exams amid no public transport. “The exams will continue for a month. What will a parent do if they have no personal transport? Where will our children go,” said a parent of Jawahar Nagar.
The Jammu and Kashmir board examinations for Class 10 started on Tuesday amid a shutdown across Kashmir and sporadic stone pelting incidents as a group of Members of European Parliament (MEPs) had arrived here. On Tuesday, some 89,000 students appeared in the Class 10 examinations with 65,000 of them in Kashmir.