NEW DELHI: Faculty members of Drishti IAS and even other coaching academies at New Delhi’s Nehru Vihar used to come in luxurious and swanky cars, waiting for guards to open their doors, according to students. This even as thousands of students were forced to sit inside the basement classrooms, raising questions on lack of ethics and empathy for the students.
UPSC aspirant Siddharth Singh informed us, “The condition of these so-called reputed faculty members and teachers at coaching institutes is so poignant that if others do not rush to open the doors of their fancy cars, they will not even bother to come out by themselves, and worse, may even go back, displaying a glaring sense of ego and sheer apathy.”
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Further adding on to the prevailing appalling conditions, Siddharth went on to say, “These coaching institutes are running a sort-of parallel government here at Nehru Vihar’s Vardhman Mall Complex, almost close to a dictatorship. The situation is so distressing that these teachers want 3-4 people to always walk closely behind them, like personal guards and attendants. But now when the institutes are facing government action over their legal negligence, they seem to have absolutely no accountability for their actions.”
Nehru Vihar’s branch of Drishti IAS, the highly reputed coaching institute founded by renowned IAS educator Vikas Divyakirti, was sealed on July 29 for violating building by-laws of the area, in the aftermath of the tragic deaths of three UPSC aspirants in Old Rajinder Nagar. The institute has been accused of operating eight classrooms in the basement, which is 25 feet beneath the surface level, alongside a filthy drainage canal, posing a significant risk to the safety and well-being of thousands of UPSC aspirants, hailing from all across India who attend coaching classes here, despite regulations permitting basement usage only for storage purposes.
Lamenting the unfortunate tragedy that unfolded in Old Rajinder Nagar on July 27, Siddharth commented, “If at all what happened in ORN is repeated here and the drainage canal collapses in an event of heavy downpour in the area, lives of minimum 200-300 students studying at Drishti IAS will be in grave danger, given the fact that approximately 800 students are present in this basement every single day.”
UPSC aspirants, concerned parents and residents have been sitting in large-scale protests in the areas of Old Rajinder Nagar and Mukherjee Nagar since the evening of July 27 after three aspirants were killed in the basement of Rau’s IAS Study Circle, demanding action against incompetent municipal authorities for neglecting student safety in the area that has been serving as the hub for civil services aspirants for decades.