A school in Gadag allowed some students to sit and attend the exam wearing their hijabs on the first day of the SSLC examination on Monday, March 28. No teachers or management staff asked them to remove it or created an issue in the beginning. But when some media persons went to the school to take photographs, some teachers rushed to the examination halls and asked the students to remove their hijab.
The incident happened in a school in Gadag town. Students wrote exams in their hijabs for more than half an hour. Some students after the exam said, "We were tense about our first paper and we do not want to divert our mind to other things, hence, we did not tell anything to our teachers." A teacher said, "We were confused in the beginning on what to do and we informed the principal and senior teachers and, in the meantime, some reporters came inside to take pictures. We asked the students to remove their hijabs and they removed and came back and wrote the exam."
Parents gathered near many examination centres as they feared that the hijab issue may arise again and they should be there to watch their children. A parent said that the SSLC is the main stage in the career of any student and they should write exams with a calm mind, hence they were present there. Some teachers also expressed that their students are writing exams without COVID restrictions after two years. In another separate incident, a girl was sent back home to wear her uniform.
Meanwhile, in Hubballi, a girl, a student of Sardar Mahaboob Ali Khan School, entered the examination centre in the Ghatikeri area wearing a burqa. When the centre in charge asked the student to remove the burqa, she was found not wearing the uniform too. Initially, some kind of resistance was shown by the parents but later the issue was sorted out. The girl went back home and returned in uniform to write the exam.
Textile, Handloom and Sugar Minister Shankar Patil Munenakoppa visited a school at Kusugal village to greet the students coming to the examination hall. Whereas in Dharwad, Deputy Commissioner Nitesh Patil visited some schools to monitor conducting of examinations. DC Patil said, "Out of the total of 28,332 registered for the examination, 28,065 students appeared for the examination for the first language and 267 remained absent." A total of 113 examination centres are set up across the district for regular students and three for external students, who are 1163 in number, he added.
