Admission agony spurs teen suicide
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OUR SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT
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Dharmendra’s (left) mother breaks down in Bokaro on Wednesday;
the note the Sree Ayyappa Public School alumnus left behind. (Pankaj Singh)
A student of a premier Bokaro institution chose the noose over life after he was allegedly denied admission to Class XI at his own alma mater despite a good CGPA in his CBSE examination, the results of which were declared last month.
Dharmendra Kumar, who studied from nursery to Class X at Sree Ayyappa Public School in Sector V-D of the steel city, hanged himself with a nylon rope in the outhouse of their Sector I-C quarters at 10am on Wednesday, an hour after venting his frustration before his father. The 17-year-old also left behind a suicide note, saying his average academic record had spurred his death wish.
That the mad scramble for a school berth snuffed out a young life in Bokaro is a fresh pointer to our country’s skewed education system, where emphasis is still laid on competition — marks or no marks — instead of learning.
Sources said that Ayyappa has a total of 325 seats for pure science and 65 for bio-science. Normally, students fetching a CGPA of 9.4 or above get the cream berths.
According to father Ram Narayan Gupta, Dharmendra — the youngest among his three sons, the other two being alumni of the same school who have joined defence forces — notched a CGPA of 8.4 out of 10 in the CBSE Class X examination and wanted to study science at Ayyappa. “But, despite requests for the past three weeks, the school refused admission,” said the bereaved father, a fruit wholesaler.
Around 9am on Wednesday, the depressed teen opened up to his father. “He told me, ‘Papa, I want to study science and crack IIT-JEE. Please do something. Please see that I get admission to some good school, though my first preference is my school, where all my friends will study in Class XI’. My son was in tears and I was willing to cough up donations, if necessary. I promised him that I will not leave any stone unturned to secure him a seat,” Gupta recalled.
Incidentally, Dharmendra had failed to make it to the Class XI merit list of DAV School too. “After Ayyappa turned him down, my boy had applied to DAV. The list came out yesterday (Tuesday) and his name was not there either,” the father said.
To ensure he had his own space in his adolescence years, Dharmendra’s doting parents had allowed him to shift to the outhouse, a stone’s throw from their Q.No. 1076, a decision they perhaps regret now.
After the dad-son talk in the morning, the teenager went to the outhouse on the pretext of getting a bottle of water. He never came back. An hour later, his mother hollered at neighbours to check on him. The boy was found hanging from a ceiling fan in the outhouse. His dying declaration on a scrap of paper lay on the ground.
Family and friends rushed Dharmendra to Bokaro General Hospital, but doctors declared him brought dead.
Ayyappa principal Latha Mohnan denied that the school had spurned admission requests. “In fact, Dharmendra Kumar was invited for counselling on June 4, but he did not turn up. We thought he was trying elsewhere,” she said, adding that the cradle was taking in other students who had scored much less than Dharmendra and there was no reason to turn him away.
The boy’s father and classmates contest the school’s claim. “Had our school given Dharmendra admission, he would have been alive today,” a friend said, adding, “Time and again he had shared his frustration with us.”
DSP Raja Ram Prasad confirmed suicide. The body has been sent for post-mortem.
Is academic competition healthy for a child’s growth?
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