AURANGABAD, July 12: The agitation against private coaching classes in Aurangabad is gathering steam, with members of the All India Students Federation (AISF) conducting its third `raid' early on Saturday morning.Taking a suo-motu decision to disrupt and pressure private tutorials run by college lecturers to shut shop following a June 24 order of the Bombay High Court on coaching classes, the AISF went to the residence of mathematics lecturer, M A Deshpande, at 5 am on Saturday and asked him to shut down his classes. This is the third `raid' undertaken by the AISF over the last four days.Deshpande, a lecturer with the Saraswati Bhuwan Science College run by an education trust headed by Padmavibhushan Govindbhai Shroff, runs his tutorials from his residence. A press release issued by the AISF says Deshpande ``greeted its members warmly'', unlike other lecturers whom they have confronted on previous occasions. It says he expressed his inability to shut down his classes following pressure from students.``I've offered to resign from the college several times but the management is in no mood to relieve me,'' Deshpande told the AISF members, the release says.Students enrolled with Deshpande's classes confronted AISF members asking why smaller classes were being targetted. They also demanded action against `glamour' coaching classes like Chate, Aghade, Vidyalankar and Jadhav. The students were later pacified by AISF leaders, who said they would extend their agitation to tutorials which spend lakhs of rupees attracting the `student market', the release says. Meanwhile, a AISF delegation met Shroff and urged him to take action against lecturers in his institute who ran private classes. Shroff assured them of quick action, the release adds.
