[HT] Colleges open amid conviction of three students for ragging

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Ashok Das, Hindustan Times
Hyderabad, July 05, 2007

It’s that time of the year when professional colleges open after vacation and along with that comes the menace of ragging. While laws have been enacted to make ragging a punishable offence, few get convicted because the authorities as well as the community still take lenient view of the problem.

However, this time before colleges open, a stern message has been sent across to perpetrators of ragging in Andhra Pradesh. A court in Kurnool, the former capital of Andhra Pradesh,have sentenced three students of Kurnool Medical College for ragging their juniors.

Principal junior civil judge V Krishna Murthy on Wednesday sentenced N Srinivas, CP Muralikrishna Reddy and A Sudhir Kumar Reddy, the three senior students to undergo jail-term for a year and pay a fine of Rs 5,000 each.

They had summoned three first year students to their hostel room on August 30 last year and made them to strip, in the name of ragging. Later they took the pictures of the stripped students using their cell phone cameras.

This is the first case of conviction in a ragging case in the state.