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NAGPUR: Giving religion and Aadhaar information has been made optional by Nagpur University (NU) but many affiliated colleges are not allowing students to skip these fields while filling admission forms for ongoing postgraduate centralized admission process (CAP).

Several students approached TOI saying they were asked to compulsorily mention their religion and Aadhaar number even if they did not wish to avail any government scholarship or monetary aid while filling college forms for MA and MSc.

They said when they confronted the admission in-charges saying they were "atheist" and there was no such option in the list of religions, the officials asked them to leave the premises. Students also said they were applying under open category and didn’t intend to avail any concession, yet were being forced to submit a photocopy of Aadhaar card and bank account.

The stand adopted by colleges is shocking since university has kept the religion and Aadhaar column optional in the registration form for CAP enrollment itself.

Last year, a student had written to the vice-chancellor saying he wished to keep his religious belief personal and would like to leave the religion column blank. NU had agreed to the request and made it optional.

Activist Ashu Saxena said forcing students to mention their religion was unconstitutional. “The compulsion by colleges infringes on the rights guaranteed by our constitution. Every individual has freedom to practise a religion of his choice or not to associate with any belief,” she said.

Colleges said data about number of minority students enrolled with them had to be provided to the government and they could not give exemption. Saxena, a former secretary of Students Federation of India, said the colleges could provide data that a certain number of students did not conform to any religious identity. “Even in census data, the column is marked as blank in such cases,” she said.

Regarding Aadhaar, Saxena said the Supreme Court had already provided respite to citizens who were being harassed by banks, utilities, and other agencies to link the unique identification number with accounts. VC SP Kane was out of town and couldn’t be contacted.

NU officials said Aadhaar was helping government curb fake scholarship cases and therefore it was now ‘unofficially’ a must for every student. On religion they said, it was left to the discretion of the colleges and the university could not do much about it.

