Bring me back my Childhood!,

Bring me back my Childhood!

I am okay with being labelled a failure. I am not okay with being deprived of my childhood.

Megha Satapathy

It is late March. And since we are running a couple of months late due to the ongoing pandemic, it is the ‘Pre-Boards’ season for teenagers who are being looked in the eye by an imminent entry into adulthood. But for most of them, who should supposedly be excited about starting a new chapter in life, this is a season of immense mental stress and anxiety.

I am one of those teens. This isn’t my story. But this is our story.



“Engineering ya Medical?” 

“Ninety-seven percent? And how much did the topper score?” 

“Do remember how high the cut-off for that prestigious college was last year.” 

“Why exactly did you not apply for that coaching giant’s entrance test?” 

“Your cousin attends the largest school in the city and goes to three different coaching classes over it, and you can’t even sit at your study table for six hours?” 

“Don’t you understand that your exams are just a couple of months away?”

These questions may not make sense to the general reader. But for us, who have been at the receiving end of these questions, they make enough sense to be able to haunt us at night. And that is why it does not surprise us when the answer to all these questions ends with a simple “Let me sleep…” 

In 2017, when Nidhin, twenty-two, a student of IIT Kharagpur was found hanging from the ceiling fan of his room with a suicide note that said just those three words, a major part of the country mourned for him. But what if I tell you that almost every hour one such innocent Nidhin’s dreams are shattered? While school life is said to be the best time of one’s life, it is not only disappointing but also depressing that suicide is the leading cause of deaths among 14- to 26-year-olds. And the reason behind this disheartening statistic is not that we are ‘too sensitive to handle stress’ as claimed by many.

Picture this: Teenagers are rarely given the opportunity to speak up in important family discussions. In fact, most of the time we are not even included, because apparently, we don’t know enough. Then how do you expect us, sixteen-year-olds, to decide their careers, something which is going to affect our entire life? Why sixteen?

 Children are made to choose their ‘stream’ as early as sixth grade, if not before, courtesy to the blooming coaching industry. In our entire schooling life, you do not allow us to explore anything besides our studies and suddenly one day you ask us to choose what we want to do with our life? Tell me it isn’t ridiculous! Do you really let us choose?

 Because in India, despite there being a plethora of glorious opportunities, there are only two jobs that are prestigious enough: Engineer and Doctor.

Right? Few students have the inner calling to achieve something particular. When these children are compelled to choose from these minimal options early on, it only pushes them into intense confusion, which leads them into anxiety and the feeling of being a failure. And the children who do have a strong calling? They become victims of the ‘doctor/engineer trap’ and their dreams are killed even before they can take shape. In case you have been one of the lucky ones and do not understand why young people have to decide their careers so early, let me bring you that reason as well.

Thousands of students in identical attires pour into huge shiny buildings in the morning and emerge out of them only in the late evening; coaching classes are the new trend these days. As soon as we reach 9th grade, sometime even before that, we are put into coaching classes because they are supposed to be engineer/doctor-manufacturing hubs. On our first day, the sheer number of students scares us as the enormity of the competition hits. And by our first week, our minds are clouded with self-doubt and mounting anxiety. 

These so-called classes, that actually have made a business out of education, choke us. Yet we continue. Struggling through every single mark and each single rank, we continue, till our 10th grade starts to end.

That is when we are hit on the face by the truth that when it comes to auctioning education, schools aren’t left behind either! Entrance tests for 11th grade are conducted two to three months prior to Board exams by most, if not all, premier institutes. And we are asked by our parents to sit for most of them too. We squeeze in the preparation for these tests in between our normal schedule of studying for Boards, just so that we don’t miss that most coveted seat. Those of us who find our names in the list of qualified candidates, perform reasonably well with that boost of confidence. And those who don’t, invariably score worse in their Boards than they have the potential to. Notice the pattern yet?

And if you are one of those people who think that the problem lies with us and we should actually learn from toppers: toppers have it worse than the average student. The weight of expectations on them is much more than others. And as if the natural stress of performing well is not enough, they are taunted and rebuked for every mark they lose as well. With our teachers, our parents, everyone ultra-focused on success, nobody bothered to teach us how to deal with failure, and that it is okay to fail at times. And that is when stories like that of Nidhin enter the picture.

All our brothers and sisters, who chose to end their lives rather than live through this hell, were not weak. They were neglected. They might have appeared to have everything, but their emotional and psychological needs were not looked after. When all they needed was a helping hand, a pat on the back assuring them it was alright, we failed to be there for them and aggravated something that could have been prevented. When the matter was still at hand and professional therapy could have helped them, the age-old stigma associated with mental health came into play and they were left alone again. And when they had finally had it all, they were labelled a failure when it was the society, the system, and their parents who failed them. Yes, parents. No school, no coaching can be depressing enough when there is a warm home to return. But how far are we from that home?

We love our parents. Just as they would do anything for us, we would do anything for them as well. And they have every right to have expectations from us. But when they impose their humongous will upon us, as if the expectations we have from ourselves are not big enough, it hurts. Parents compel. They compare. Instead of supporting, they hover, and it hurts. When they ask about our marks and ranks before asking how we are, it hurts. Their intentions are not wrong. But in their attempt to give us a happy tomorrow, they snatched away our happiness today.

This story is not just about a single student or a single parent. This is about the entire system. Give us back our happiness. Give us back the thrill of running with our friends under the sun, without a single care. Give us back the joy of learning things instead of memorising. Give us back the time when we were students and not just pawns of this business that education has become. Give us back the relief of not having to worry that the next Nidhin will be someone we know. Give us back our childhood.

In case you think this issue is not crucial enough, you are part of the problem. Because this is an issue, which if not immediately looked at, holds the capacity to push the entire country’s future into darkness. The nation’s future is in our hands. And our future is in yours. Listen to our story. Hear us. Because we are the stars of future India. And how bright we will dazzle is up to you.

[1] https://www.thenewsminute.com/article/let-me-sleep-final-words-kerala-student-iit-kharagpur-he-hanged-death-60815

[2] https://ncrb.gov.in/en/accidental-deaths-suicides-india-2019




Megha Satapathy

Intern, Goa Chronicle

#ExamPressure, #ParentalPressure, #Coaching, #BoardExams, #Depression, #Suicide, #LetMeSleep, #Education, #Teenagers, #MentalHealth

No life, no hobbies, burnout, lost childhood — the price students pay for a prized IIT seat - THE PRINT

No life, no hobbies, burnout, lost childhood — the price students pay for a prized IIT seat

Last year, 1.5 million students took the JEE to qualify for 13,000 seats in 23 IITs across the country – in other words, for each seat there were 115 aspirants.

SONIYA AGRAWAL 

22 March, 2021 1:07 pm IST

Students appearing for the JEE Mains in Kolkata in September 2020 (representational image) | ANI
Text Size: A- A+


New Delhi: They are the country’s premier engineering institutes and getting into them is internationally considered more difficult than admission into Princeton, America’s Ivy League university.

Last year, 1.5 million students took the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) to qualify for 13,000 seats in 23 IITs across the country — in other words, for each seat there were 115 aspirants.

So intense is the pressure and so gruelling is the preparation required that students as young as 14 start the process, often missing out on the simple joys of adolescence. Most give up extra-curricular activities, relationships with friends and peers, and all forms of entertainment to achieve the goal. By the time they achieve their aim, if they do, many realise they have lost out on social skills, ability to communicate easily with others (an attribute now known as soft skills), and of course, some part of their youth.

An IIT Delhi professor who has been teaching for the last two decades underlines this reality, saying when students come to them after two or three years of prep, they don’t even know how to behave socially.

“They have been cut off from society, they are unaware of current affairs, and are desperately in need of our induction programme for freshers where we try to re-orient them to society and the institute,” the professor said on the condition of anonymity.

This skill gap haunts them even when they graduate. Despite all the hard work engineering students put in, a survey conducted in 2019 found that 80 per cent of engineers “are not fit for any job in the knowledge economy and only 2.5 per cent of them possess technical skills in Artificial Intelligence (AI) that industry requires”. The skill gap between what they learn and what is required of them in their workspaces makes them unemployable.

Yet, in India’s shortage economy, where everything of value is kept in limited supply, there is no end to this annual exercise of competing in the JEE.

Like a 23-year-old machine learning engineer based out of Florida, who started his JEE preparation as early as Class 8, because his peers had started as early as Class 6. The engineer says he was so engrossed in his prep that he ignored basics such as good hygiene, good grooming, or even making friends.

“It took me an entire gap year before undergraduation to recognise and overcome these shortcomings,” he now says.

Or 29-year-old Shivam Narang, now working as a procurement manager with a prominent firm in Mumbai, who spent three years preparing for JEE. An “above average student”, he had to work 12-14 hours a day to crack one of the toughest exams in the world, making him lose out on much of his teenage years.

A basketball player in high school, Narang had to quit the sport after Class 10, once he started preparing for the engineering entrance, moving to Kota from Delhi, the coaching college magnet for all IIT aspirants.

“There is no room for hobbies – even playing your favourite sport for 30 minutes comes with a feeling of guilt,” Narang says. “Add to that the shift to an alien city with a competitive environment, which is so difficult to adjust to.”

The constant pressure and fear of losing out led him to leave Kota. He took a break and took admission into a National Institute of Technology (NIT).

“The loss of my values is what affected me the most. I am still very competitive and don’t feel comfortable working in a team. My personality changed, as did my body. I gained 35 kilos in a matter of months and my weight went up to 120 kilos,” Narang remembers.

Also Read: 443 Delhi students committed suicide in 5 yrs, exam stress & failed relationships to blame

Some students such as Narang start preparing for the JEE at the age of 16, but others start as early as 12. These students, along with attending regular school, also go to coaching sessions and take weekly examinations. In the routine of coaching, school and tests, students claim that they miss out on important life skills, networking and overall personality development.

The National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) for medical college admission, which has become a political hot potato in Tamil Nadu, so much so that the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) has promised to scrap it, is only marginally less difficult. 

In 2020, more than 1.5 million students appeared for it, a 15 per cent rise from the number of applicants in 2018.

Of them, under 800,000 students were able to qualify for one of the 82,026 seats at 541 medical colleges across the country. After the introduction of the examination in 2017, several students committed suicide after failing to clear it.

The DMK has promised to do away with the examination and put back in place the previous system of admission to medical colleges in the state, based on results of the state Class 12 board exam. 

The All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK), meanwhile, has offered to provide additional training to NEET aspirants.

According to coaching institutes, an average student spends 16 hours a week attending these extra classes, in addition to their regular school and studies. The annual financial cost of attending these sessions goes up to Rs 2 lakh.

Pragya Bhardwaj, 35, who now practises as a gynaecologist in Bengaluru, took a three-year break after school to prepare for her medical entrance test.

“I could not get an MBBS seat in the first attempt and it required two more attempts. Finally, after the third attempt, I got a seat in a reputed medical college in Karnataka. But the journey to get there was gruelling and took a toll on my personality, my health, mental well-being and social connections, almost everything,” Bhardwaj recalls.

Students are allowed two attempts at JEE, but there is no cap for the number of NEET attempts — there is, however, an age bar of 25.

The problem is not individual but systemic. As Dr Soumitra Pathare, director of the Pune-based Centre for Mental Health Law and Policy, puts it: “If you create a scarcity for something and push young students to try and get that scarce product in a restricted environment, it is bound to affect them mentally.

“Premier institutes in our country have an admission rate of about 0.1 per cent, so what kind of outcome can you expect? No matter how resilient an individual is, when the system is rigged against them, it is criminal when the individual breaks down.”

Parents go to the extent of disconnecting their children from the outer world to “help them focus”. Activities such as watching television, surfing the Internet, and participating in social events, sports and hobbies are placed at the bottom of the list of priorities. Shweta Garg, 50, a homemaker based out of Ahmedabad, says the two years her son spent preparing for the JEE meant the entire family put a pause on normal life.

“Those two years were not only difficult for my son but for the entire family as well. To ensure that he was able to focus on boards and competitive exams, we removed the cable connection so that there were zero disturbances for him. Family vacations and social events were given a skip and a serious environment was created in the house,” she told ThePrint.

Yet, her son was unable to make it to an IIT. Garg sidesteps that, saying she thinks her son matured during the period. Although he missed meeting his friends and cousins, he knew he had to prioritise.

Also Read: IIT-Hyderabad students blame isolated campus and academic pressure for suicides

The role of coaching classes

Coaching institutes make things worse for aspirants. Kishore Kumar, an IIT Kharagpur alumnus based out of Delhi, who has been coaching JEE and NEET students for the past 11 years, says the institutes create an atmosphere where students are divided into batches based on their performance.

If a student spends five years training in a ‘low-performing’ batch, it conditions the child to not think of himself/herself beyond a low-performing student. He/she will then hesitate to take part in group activities or anything else to assist his/her personality growth.

Anand Kumar of ‘Super 30’ fame says he ensures the focus of his students is on enhancing their creativity so that they don’t become another cog in the wheel.

“Most of my students are from rural backgrounds with poor financial stability,” he said. “Whoever shows a flair for scientific learning turns up for coaching. My focus largely remains on enhancing the ability of students to grasp concepts. They need to learn about real-life applications of their studies to ensure success even after getting into an IIT.”

Speaking about the types of skills he imparts, Kumar said, “Instead of just going by textbook examples, I try to relate the concepts with their real life situations. This helps students understand things better. I also need to prepare them for a massive shift, from a rural setting to a college, and then a formal workplace. To do so, we pick examples of world leaders with humble beginnings and read from their biographies.”

Of the 510 students he has trained over 19 years, 410 have got into IITs, NITs and other notable engineering colleges.

Some experts even question the necessity of coaching classes. Meeta Sengupta, founder of the Centre for Education Strategy, a Delhi-based think tank dealing in education policy issues, said: “Although experts say that coaching helps students take the exams, it is not healthy for children. They lose the space for discovery and innovation during the course of such training.”

Several students, because of the lack of an outlet and no mindspace for anything other than studies, experience a burnout by the time they reach a university. This leads to several mental health problems.

A mental health expert with an IIT, who chose to remain anonymous, said, “The most common problem among IIT students, who have all their lives been seen as high achievers, is the sense of a vacuum. It can also be called an ‘existential crisis’. After years of rigorous training, students start searching for a deeper meaning in life. This can either happen because of anxiety issues or depression, or exacerbate them as well.”

Also Read: ‘We didn’t do enough’ — AIIMS faculty and students say after suicides by doctors

(This report has been updated to accurately reflect that last year 1.5 million students took the JEE to qualify for 13,000 seats in 23 IITs across the country – and for each seat there were 115 aspirants, not 1,000. The error is regretted.)

Subscribe to our channels on YouTube & Telegram

Ashok Arora Ex Secretary Supreme Court Bar Open Letter to Prime Minister Modi,

How Big Tech Is Importing India’s Caste Legacy to Silicon Valley,

Bloomberg Equality




Amit Jatav at home as he tried to continue his studies with his university, IIT Delhi, going online. Behind him is a portrait of B.R. Ambedkar, a Dalit thinker and activist who led the drafting of the Constitution of India and is responsible for the fight against caste discrimination in the country.
Photographer: Anshika Varma for Bloomberg Businessweek

How Big Tech Is Importing India’s Caste Legacy to Silicon Valley


Graduates from the Indian Institutes of Technology are highly sought after by employers. They can also bring problems from home.
By
Saritha Rai
12 March 2021, 08:00 GMT+11

On a sunny day in early 2017, Sundar Pichai, Alphabet Inc.’s chief executive officer, returned to his alma mater, the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, in West Bengal, to speak before 3,500 students. Welcomed as the “rock star” leader of the “world’s most innovative company,” he reminisced about skipping classes and meeting his college girlfriend—now his wife. He also pitched Google to the soon-to-be-graduates in attendance. How many wanted to work there, the interviewer asked. Hundreds of hands went up. “Wow, maybe we should open a campus in Kharagpur,” Pichai joked.

As far as feeder schools go, it doesn’t get much better for Google than the network of 23 ultracompetitive, government-funded IITs. Every year hundreds of their graduates join the world’s biggest tech companies. In 2003, when the school system celebrated its 50th anniversary, Bill Gates delivered a keynote speech praising grads who’d come to work at Microsoft Corp. over the years, noting that the company had, in turn, invested more money in the IITs than in any other institution outside the U.S. and the U.K.


IIT hopefuls leave a test center after taking an entrance exam in suburban New Delhi.
Photographer: Sunil Ghosh/Hindustan Times/Shutterstock

For all the IITs’ proficiency at training and placing students, though, the coders, programmers, product developers, and engineers fanning out to global tech bring with them the troubled legacy of India’s caste system. On campus, students are surrounded by—and in some cases participate in—a culture of discrimination, bullying, and segregation that targets fellow pupils from India’s Scheduled Castes, also known as Dalits. The IITs officially discourage such harassment, but the prejudice against these students remains quite open.

Caste in India speaks, as race does in America, to centuries of social, cultural, and economic divisions. Unlike in the U.S., though, India has since 1950 had a national system of affirmative action designed to undo the legacy of bias. Among its provisions are ones that help Dalits and other oppressed groups get into and pay for college. For nearly half a century, IIT admissions have been subject to a reservation system that’s still hotly debated on the campuses. In recent years, the schools have opposed attempts to extend affirmative action to faculty hires, arguing it would dilute the quality of the applicant pool and undermine their meritocratic image.

The IITs are notoriously cutthroat, starting with the admissions process. Some 2.2 million people have registered to take the 2021 entrance exam, to vie for roughly 16,000 slots. About 15% of those are allotted to students from the Scheduled Castes (SCs) and another 7.5% to applicants from the Scheduled Tribes (STs), indigenous people who’ve faced marginalization and whose status has also been formalized by the constitution. To fill those slots, universities sometimes offer seats to students with test scores below the cutoff point—though not as far below as is commonly assumed.

Caste-based resentment at the IITs can run high. In one video posted on YouTube in 2018, a student poring over a pile of books is labeled “GEN,” for general pool, while the two students sleeping nearby are identified as “SC” and “ST.” In another post circulated widely among IIT groups last year, a student suggested Covid-19 should also give preferential treatment to the marginalized groups. “My dear Corona,” it said in Hindi. “In every sphere SC/STs get first preference. So if you can, please look into the same.”

Dalit IIT graduates who’ve managed to land jobs in the U.S. say that such attitudes can be found there, too. Last year a Dalit graduate of IIT Bombay filed suit in the U.S. against Cisco Systems Inc. and two of his fellow alums, saying he’d experienced caste-based discrimination at their hands while the three of them were employed at the company. The accompanying publicity prompted a wave of complaints about caste discrimination in American tech—allegations that seemed to blindside the industry.

Jatav in a classroom at the school he attended in his hometown of Karauli, Rajasthan.
Photographer: Anshika Varma for Bloomberg Businessweek

Amit Jatav, a Dalit from Karauli, in the northwestern state of Rajasthan, remembers catching “the IIT bug” in high school, where he excelled in chemistry, physics, and math. His father, an elementary school teacher, and his mother, a fieldworker, scraped together money from relatives and local lenders to send him for a year of test prep. He took the entrance exam in 2017 and got into IIT Delhi on his first try.

Jatav’s classmates quickly identified him as Dalit. He’d been educated in Hindi-language schools, and his English was poor. His clothes were worn and shabby. He didn’t have a smartphone. In an environment where entrance exam scores are status symbols, Jatav had placed relatively low, marking him as a “quota” student. He heard loud comments saying he was at IIT only because of his “category” instead of “earning it rightfully.” He wasn’t invited to study groups, dinners, or social events.

“I struggled with my studies, but nobody helped,” says Jatav, now 21 and in his final year. “The attitude was: He’s a Dalit, let him struggle.”

The caste system traces as far back as ancient India. It comprises four core strata, with the Dalits lying outside and below. (The word “Dalit,” in classical Sanskrit, means “broken.”) These divisions still permeate life for many Indians, dictating how they work and worship, eat and marry, own land and vote. More than 200 million of the country’s 1.3 billion people are classified as Dalits.

In the 1920s, Mahatma Gandhi fought to eradicate practices separating Dalits from others, such as preventing them from entering Hindu temples. After independence in 1947, India’s first minister of law and justice, Dalit campaigner B.R. Ambedkar, wrote recompense into the constitution he helped draft. The move banned discrimination based on caste and guaranteed the government’s ability to secure representation and unlock opportunity for people who’d lacked both for centuries. India introduced an affirmative action program in 1950; within a few years it was reserving seats in colleges for oppressed Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, a practice it extended to the IITs in 1973. (An exception is made for “the creamy layer,” the official term for lower-caste people who’ve managed to achieve high status and economic security, who aren’t eligible for the quota system.)

“Caste and class run parallel at the IITs, which are a microcosm of Indian society. For Dalits, life on the campus is a daily reminder of who they are”

Despite this, coded and overt forms of discrimination against Dalits persist, with the education system serving as a primary vector. At secondary school in Rajasthan, Mahesh Kumar recalls, he and his father swept the classrooms as a condition of Kumar’s scholarship; they were expected not to make contact with the teachers’ belongings so as not to taint them. When Kumar gained admission to IIT (BHU) Varanasi in 2013, he tried to obscure his caste status by dropping his last name, but it didn’t help. At the beginning of an IIT school year, senior students often orchestrate a hazing ritual known as kholna, calling on first-year students to give their name, their hometown, and the rank they achieved on the entrance exam. If a surname isn’t a giveaway, an unusual rank on the entrance exam will be.

Another Dalit, Akshit Sangomla, says that in his first year at IIT Kanpur he refused to reveal his rank. It got out anyway, and soon seniors began stopping him to grill him on his engineering knowledge. Sangomla, who was living away from home for the first time, remembers being terrified by the badgering. He also found himself, like Jatav at IIT Delhi, left out of study groups, dinners, and celebrations. His confidence shot, he struggled academically, falling into a vicious cycle that led to his expulsion after five semesters. “As a Dalit you’ll always be an outsider,” says Sangomla, who now works as a journalist at a magazine based in New Delhi.

Only one IIT out of the dozen Bloomberg Businessweek contacted for this story—including Delhi, Bombay, Kharagpur, (BHU) Varanasi, Madras, and Kanpur—responded to repeated requests for comment made by email and phone over several months. Many of the schools have appointed liaison officers to look into caste discrimination on campus; they didn’t respond to requests for comment either. A representative of one school said on background that the IITs didn’t want to get drawn into a “controversial” topic. The only formal response came from IIT Roorkee, which said it hadn’t received any caste-based discrimination complaints in the past five years. “The reservation policy has helped, without exacerbating caste based discrimination,” a spokesperson wrote.

In a 2016 survey of students at IIT (BHU) Varanasi, World Bank economist Priyanka Pandey and her brother, activist Sandeep Pandey, found that Dalits not only experience more discrimination and negativity than others, but their academic performance is also lower, even after controlling for different socioeconomic backgrounds. Asked about the gap, a majority of respondents attributed it to the “lower ability” of lower-caste students. “Caste and class run parallel at the IITs, which are a microcosm of Indian society,” says Sandeep, who holds a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from the University of California at Berkeley and has taught social justice classes at IITs. “For Dalits, life on the campus is a daily reminder of who they are.”

Patel at her parents’ home in Raipur, Chhattisgarh.
Photographer: Zishaan A. Latif for Bloomberg Businessweek

A 2020 graduate of IIT Guwahati’s design program, Agrata Patel, got into the school through a separate but parallel quota system for students from “other backwards classes,” or OBCs—historically oppressed groups that are covered by the reservation system but aren’t Scheduled Castes or Tribes. Patel says that, though she faced special pressure as someone from a reserved category, it was easier for her than for her Dalit friends and classmates. “It’s a huge load on them. People are always judging them,” she says. “I felt for them, I still feel for them. My grades were good—nobody got a chance to point a finger at me.” That track led her to her current job, at an Australian tech company.

Dalits in the IIT system often have a rougher path to employment. After his first few semesters in Varanasi, Kumar fell into a deep depression and took time off from school. Overwhelmed by debt, he considered bidding for a sewer-cleaning contract that paid 4,000 rupees ($55) a month. The social hierarchy that considers Dalits “impure” consigns them to poorly paid, “unclean” jobs such as scavenging, cleaning sewers, and disposing of dead animals. Kumar even considered selling a kidney.

Then came a stroke of good fortune. A local paper reported that an IIT student was considering sewer cleaning and organ donation, prompting an outpouring of donations. Kumar returned to Varanasi and graduated in 2019. He now works as an assistant manager with a government-owned mining company in the eastern city of Durgapur.

There’s no reliable data on IIT student placement rates or professional salaries, but anecdotal evidence suggests the grind is worth it for many. In December, when students traditionally begin receiving job offers, news outlets relay how quickly they’re coming in, and schools boast of how many graduates will make 10 million rupees or more.

In a 2017 paper, French researchers Odile Henry and Mathieu Ferry found that not all IIT graduates are greeted by such an enthusiastic job market. Lower-caste students were barely half as likely to get jobs as general-pool students with similar majors and academic performance; they were also paid less. The researchers attributed the difference primarily to a divide between Dalit and non-Dalit students in soft skills and social capital. In the lucrative private sector, recruiters look beyond grades for candidates who demonstrate curiosity, leadership, poise, or a competitive spirit—qualities that might show up in, say, extracurricular activities, a glowing recommendation from a teacher, or simply a student’s confidence in an interview.

“If one of the criticisms of the quota policy is its lack of meritocracy, since it encourages students whose educational outcomes are lower,” the authors wrote, “we note here that it is reserved groups that suffer unequal treatment for equal academic success.”

Jatav in his hometown of Karauli, Rajasthan.
Photographer: Anshika Varma for Bloomberg Businessweek

Last year, allegations of caste bias got a public airing some 8,300 miles away from the IIT campuses. On behalf of the Indian Cisco Systems employee who alleged he’d been discriminated against based on his caste, California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing brought a suit in San Jose against the company and two other Indian employees. All three were graduates of IIT Bombay.

American law protects workers from disparate treatment based on a handful of characteristics, including race, sex, religion, and disability status. This was the first time, though, that anyone had argued those protections should extend to Dalits. The complaint said that the unnamed employee had faced discrimination by two upper-caste managers since 2015 and that he’d reported one to human resources for outing him as a Dalit and informing colleagues he’d enrolled in the IIT through affirmative action. The employee said the discrimination had continued under the second manager.

Cisco denied the charges. “We have zero tolerance for discrimination and take all complaints of unfair treatment very seriously,” a spokesperson says. “In this case, we thoroughly and fully investigated the employee’s concerns and found that he was treated fairly, highly compensated, and afforded opportunities to work on coveted projects.” In its response to the suit, Cisco made an additional argument: Because caste isn’t a protected category under U.S. civil rights laws, the allegations are immaterial and should be stricken. The court recently denied Cisco’s petition to move the case to arbitration, and the company has filed an appeal.

Advocacy groups in the U.S. have weighed in on both sides. The Hindu American Foundation filed a declaration in support of Cisco, saying that though it vehemently opposes “all forms of prejudice and discrimination,” the state’s case “blatantly violates the rights of Hindu Americans.” Meanwhile, the Ambedkar International Center, a Dalit advocacy group, filed a brief in support of the state, encouraging the court to acknowledge caste discrimination and set a precedent prohibiting it. “American civil rights law has little experience with the Indian caste system, but it is very familiar with the idea of caste: the notion that some people are born to low stations in life in which they are forced to remain,” the motion reads.

The case inspired a flood of tech workers to tell their own stories. A U.S.-based Dalit advocacy group, Equality Labs, told the Washington Post in October that more than 250 tech workers had come forward in the wake of the Cisco suit to report incidents of caste-based harassment. Thirty Dalit engineers, all women, also shared a joint statement with the Post that said they’d experienced caste bias in the U.S. tech sector.

For years the industry has been criticized for doing too little to rectify a culture seen as hostile to women, Black people, and Latinos. In response, companies have held town halls, instituted anti-harassment training, and made very public promises to do better. On caste, though, executives have largely pleaded ignorance. Microsoft is a rare exception: The company, whose CEO, Satya Nadella, is Indian-American, says that it’s received a few complaints of caste bias and that it has more work to do. Google, for its part, says it will investigate any discrimination claims based on caste; it wouldn’t say whether it had received any, and Pichai didn’t respond to Businessweek’s requests for comment.

Another Indian-American executive, Shantanu Narayen, has been CEO at Adobe Inc. since 2007. The company employs hundreds of Indian expats, including more than 100 who graduated from an IIT. In an interview with Bloomberg TV last year, Narayen, a graduate of an engineering school (though not an IIT) in his native Hyderabad, rejected the idea that any of Adobe’s Indian workers might show bias based on caste. What the company “has always stood for and our founders instituted as the way of creating this company is equality for all,” he said. “We have not had any of those issues.”

It would be naive for U.S. companies to assume that Indian hires leave their prejudices on the subcontinent, says Sarit K. Das, a professor of mechanical engineering at IIT Madras who until February was director of IIT Ropar. “Graduates carry this to Amazon or Google or wherever, and the feeling toward the other person is that you didn’t make it like me, you are inferior,” he says.

Ram Kumar, a Dalit alum of IIT Delhi, has worked in the tech industry for more than two decades, with stints at Cisco, Dell, and other companies. When he arrived in Silicon Valley in the early 2000s, he found “another mini-India arranged by clusters of Indian hierarchy,” he says. Whereas dominant-caste Indians might see expat communities as sources of professional networking and support, Kumar avoids them. “People will try to segregate you once they find out your caste,” he says. As a matter of self-preservation, “I’ve avoided good opportunities when I see that the CEO or CTO is Indian.”

IIT Bombay’s campus in Mumbai.
Photographer: Subhash Sharma

Back in India, Dalit students, faculty, and allies have been pushing back against discrimination. When IIT Bombay tried in 2018 to establish a separate dining hall for meat eaters—a proxy for lower-caste students, since many in the upper castes are vegetarian—student groups protested and got the move quashed, along with a rule at another dining hall that required meat eaters to use separate plates and cutlery. Opposition ended a similar effort at IIT Madras to force nonvegetarian students to use separate entrances, exits, and hand-washing stations.

Professors are also speaking out. Although the IITs are government institutions, reservation requirements don’t apply to faculty positions. More than 90% of the 6,000 faculty the system employs are from the dominant castes, a lopsidedness that reflects the populations of the schools’ Ph.D. programs, which aren’t subject to quotas either. Earlier this year, government data showed that 15 of the 31 departments at IIT Delhi and 16 of 26 at IIT Bombay admitted zero students from the Scheduled Castes to their doctoral programs last year. “I have chaired hundreds of faculty selection committees, and the discrimination against Dalits is never overt. It’s always about the attitude toward the candidates, the questions asked, and the judgment,” says Das. “We follow the rules in the letter but not in spirit.”

In 2018, Subrahmanyam Saderla, a Ph.D. graduate of IIT Kanpur, was selected as an assistant professor in the school’s aerospace engineering department, becoming one of about 150 Dalit faculty in the IIT system. He’d applied for the position through a special drive to recruit Scheduled Caste & Tribe faculty. In a later hearing before the National Commission for Scheduled Castes, Saderla said that, once he was on staff, senior faculty members called him “unsuitable and mentally unfit,” undermined him with junior colleagues and students, and suggested his appointment was a curse on the institute. The Commission directed the school to bring the matter to the police; the police complaint named four professors, all of whom denied the accusations against them.

Within months, Saderla was anonymously accused of plagiarizing his work on unmanned aircraft systems, a charge that could have led to his dismissal and the revocation of his doctorate. “They are OK if you are a clerk in the office or a junior technician,” he says. “But even if you are good enough, you can’t be a faculty member.” He thought he’d escaped the caste system, only to find that he couldn’t.

Hundreds of global scholars, academics, and activists came out in solidarity with Saderla, signing a statement condemning the alleged discrimination and institutional harassment. Saderla was absolved of the plagiarism charge, and after a year-and-a-half-long court battle, his colleagues were exonerated of the caste-discrimination charges. He’s appealing the latter decision to India’s Supreme Court. “If you are born with this tag,” he says, “it stays with you until you die.”

With cases such as this and the Cisco suit, civil-rights advocates see evidence of progress toward addressing the legacy of caste bias. “The critical mass of students who have come in through reservations has made it more difficult to marginalize them,” says Ajantha Subramanian, chair of Harvard’s anthropology department and the author of a book on caste discrimination at the IITs. “They are a force to contend with.” —With Kartikay Mehrotra, Ian King, Nico Grant, and Dina Bass

Read more: Boarding Schools for India’s Outcasts Are Tearing Down Class Barriers

Judicial safeguards against dowry deaths

Judicial safeguards against dowry deaths
A study of the existing Indian legal system against this type of crime is critical

Despite the fact that women account for nearly half of the world’s population, they face particular obstacles due to gender differences. They have been victimized and degraded by an overwhelmingly male society all over the world and have been abused socially, emotionally, economically, and sexually since time immemorial in the name of religion, rituals, and social sanctions. 

The 1948 Universal Declaration on Human Rights (UDHR) states, “All people are born free and equal in equality and privileges.” However, in the last two to three decades, women’s rights, integrity, and equality have been slowly undermined around the world. There have been many global attempts to protect women’s rights so far. It includes the Decade for Women (1975-85), international women’s conferences, amendments to the Beijing Declaration, and an action platform. Women’s rights have developed slowly across the world as a result of all of this. 

Indian women are still unfree, exploited, marketed, and repossessed without regulation more than 65 years after independence, held by coercive and unlawful combinations. Domestic violence against women has become more prevalent over the decades. 

Despite the Parliament’s 2005 Domestic Violence Act, women are still subjected to violence, primarily by their husbands or relatives, dowry deaths, severe heart attacks, and other types of violence. Indeed, in our country, a crimes-third graph of massacres against women has risen alarmingly in the cases of dowry killings, bridles, honour killings, and suicide, among other items. The dowry-related murders and suicides are such horrific crimes that they make society deeply regrettable.

New provisions in the Indian Panels Code, namely sections 304B and 498A, are added to resolve dowry killing and brutality by husbands or husband’s family. 

With section 113A and section 113B, where certain facts have been found and a disaster occurred within 7 years of marriage, the prosecution’s powers have been strengthened by enabling the presumption to be removed, thus raising the prosecution’s power. 

It is important to remember that crimes against married women are usually committed within their homes. Dowry deaths can be found in the interior corners of the bride’s in-laws’ home. Dowry deaths is a crime that cannot be proved directly. After that, the courts must rely on the credible facts. 

Of course, every effort has been made to regulate it by legislation. It’s true. The 1961 Dowry Prohibition Act, which was passed by parliament and some states has not subsidized the far-reaching amendments to the Act in the war against the bad guys.

So it seems that there are no doubts about legal standards, but how well do they protect women’s rights? The legal system, at the advanced stage, is conscious of this social melody, but the reform is a poor replacement for injustices and exploitation of affected families. Various judicial officials display a lack of respect for the reckless manner in which bride-burning cases are prosecuted. The husbands escape punishment due to various deficiencies in our current criminal justice system. As a result, a study of the existing Indian legal system against this type of crime is critical. The justification for a specific piece of legislation affecting women’s protection would then be explained. The efficient operation of family courts, the role of various NGOs and the National Committee of Women, and recommended legislation to its implications must all play a significant role in this regard.

Shafiqa Gul is a research scholar at Islamic University of Science and Technology

Death by wish,

Death by wish

A time of great degeneration of ideals

Representational image.
Telegraph picture
G.N. Devy | | 

 Published 05.03.21, 01:24 AM

A member of parliament, Mohan Delkar, was not a widely-known politician. However, in Dadra and Nagar Haveli, the tiny Union territory, and in the tribal districts in south Gujarat, he was seen as quite a phenomenon. He was elected as MP several times and held sway over most assembly constituencies in the southern tribal talukas of Gujarat. Over a week ago, he was found dead in a hotel in Mumbai. A suicide note left behind by him points to victimization and harassment by official agencies as the cause for his decision.

The note is not as elaborate as the 60-page-long note left behind by Kalikho Pul, a one-time chief minister of Arunachal Pradesh, who ended his life in August 2016. He had placed on record, under the title, “Mere Vichar” — “My Thoughts” — an elaborate account of his rise in politics and the rot he saw around him. It gave details of how even Supreme Court judges carried a price tag and how judgments could be influenced. The indictment of the system by individuals who can no more be summoned to give further testimony as witness has an obvious limitation as fact-sheets. However, they need to be read not as fact-sheets but as pointers to harsh truths.

In the same year, 2016, another suicide note was left behind by a young student in Hyderabad. It said that he had wanted to be a writer, but there was a big gap between his mind and his body. His body, Rohith Vemula felt, was a fatal accident. This student wrote, “The value of a man was reduced to his immediate identity and nearest possibility. To a vote. To a number. To a thing. Never was a man treated as a mind.” Vemula’s note lays bare the social malaise arising out of caste identity. So does the suicide note of Payal Tadvi, a tribal woman who trained as a gynaecologist and worked at the Nair Hospital in Mumbai. She realized that her social identity as an adivasi was coming in her way as a medical professional. Like a caged animal, she decided to end her life barely a year after she started her medical practice. The notes by Kalikho Pul and Mohan Delkar express their utter dismay with politics in India.

Do these tragic shockers have a message for us as a country? Nearly six decades ago, the historian, Upendra Thakur, published a study under the title, The History of Suicide in India (1963). He observed that the incidence of suicide in India is normally much higher than the cases reported in official data. The National Crime Records Bureau keeps the record. It reported 1,35,445 deaths by suicide in 2012. The NCRB, read in the light of Thakur’s well-researched observation, indicates that suicide cases have an alarming scale. The World Health Organization, too, maintains suicide statistics. The latest WHO data rank India at the 16th top place on “suicide profusion scale” among the 194 countries covered by it. The global average is 10.6 points (suicides per hundred thousand persons). Suicide incidence in India is 16, which is one and half times of the global average. Quite alarming, although the alarm tends to get neglected by conflating farmers’ indebtedness leading to their self-annihilation with the desire to reject the world which is an even more serious sign of our times. It has been quite some time since India left its farmers to die a slow death. The present regime’s complete indifference to them is its climax. However, suicidal tendency and the incidence of suicide prevail in other sections of society as well. Guru Dutt, Silk Smitha, Nafisa Joseph, Kuljeet Randhawa, Kunal Singh, Jiah Khan and Sushant Singh Rajput were celebrities, not nameless farmers. The truth is that suicidal tendency in the Indian population cannot be understood if it is merely seen as cold numbers. If numbers alone are the truth, the deaths by Covid-19, as I write this piece, come close to 1.6 lakh, while deaths by suicide for the same period, projected from the NCRB’s available three-year-old data, may be almost similar in terms of numbers. The pandemic surely deserves so much national attention; suicide, too, should deserve it.

The question involved here is not as much about death as about the medical or anatomical aspect. It is also not about the criminal aspect associated with suicide since committing or abetting suicide is in the list of crimes. The question that this alarmingly large number of suicides makes one ask is if there isn’t something fundamentally wrong with India driving some of us to reject the order of things.

I was recently going through the Dictionary of Martyrs (1857-1947) prepared by the Indian Council of Historical Research. Its volume for the old Bombay state lists nearly 1,500 names of individuals who died, in most cases knowing that they would die, in the name of freedom for India. These include persons from all castes, communities and cultural backgrounds. Many of them were the second or third generation ancestors of the farmers who committed suicide in recent time. The martyrs’ acceptance of death, painful and tragic for them and for their families, had no shade of rejection of the human order. It was, if one may imagine on their behalf, an affirmation of hope for a glorious tomorrow. The suicides of India’s farmers, artists, social activists, medical professionals, IIT students, housewives and politicians are an indication that the rot is not just in the economic inequality, in its caste discrimination, in its oppression of women and in its hopelessly bankrupt knowledge systems. It is much deeper than that. It was India that produced thousands of young men and women who willingly sacrificed their lives during the freedom struggle. Suicide is not merely death. It is death invited as an escape. Guru Dutt’s outcry in his classic of despair, Pyaasa — “Jala do, jala do, jala do yeh duniya” — accurately captures that sentiment. Suicide, apart from all the other things it means, is a declaration of the degeneration of things. The rampant incidence of suicide is a telling comment on how we have abetted the degeneration of every system, every source of hope, from the Constitution to the courts, from school to sachivalaya, from ideal to idiom. We may be a GDP-fat country, but are we doing well on the Happiness Index? No, clearly not. We need to envision India, once again, perhaps.

The author is a literary scholar and cultural activist; ganesh_devy@yahoo.com

Ayesha suicide: Despite one death every hour, the menace of dowry persists

Ayesha suicide: Despite one death every hour, the menace of dowry persists

Stories of harassment and deaths over dowry cut across class, financial, educational and religious barriers. Though dowry was made illegal decades ago, the crime is still rarely reported to the police

Written by Prerna Mittra , Ishita Sengupta | New Delhi |
March 5, 2021 6:21:42 pmAccording to the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) 2019 data for IPC cases, a woman becomes a victim of dowry death roughly every one hour. (File photo)

On February 25, Ayesha Banu, 24, a resident of Ahmedabad, recorded a video message before she jumped into the Sabarmati river and ended her life. Ayesha said she was facing harassment for dowry from her husband.

A week before, Rashika Agarwal, 25, fell to her death at her in-laws’ place in a posh locality in Kolkata. Her family alleged that she was tortured by her husband and others, and that they had given Rs 7 crore as dowry.

Stories of harassment and deaths over dowry cut across class, financial, educational and religious barriers. Though dowry was made illegal decades ago, the crime is still rarely reported to the police. The practice neither triggers mass outrage nor public conversations, unless maybe when it has led to deaths, as has happened in cases of Rashika and Ayesha.

A casual search on the internet will throw up such countless horrifying news pieces as these: In 2020, a 40-year-old man in Ahmedabad was arrested for sexually molesting his 14-year-old daughter and torturing his wife for dowry; In 2019, a 27-year-old woman from Kerala was starved to death over dowry. According to police, the woman was denied food for three weeks, and weighed only 20 kg at the time of her death; In 2014, one Neha Yadav was set on fire by her in-laws and the 29-year-old succumbed to her injuries.

ALSO READ |Ayesha suicide case: Arrested from Rajasthan, husband brought to Ahmedabad

Normalised as “gifts to the bride”, the rules of the game in the Indian marriages haven’t changed over the years.

Aishwarya, a former journalist, who got married to an IIT graduate recently, says: “My parents gave Rs 14 lakh as dowry, besides jewellery and a luxury car. There was no protest, just some muffled negotiations, when things were being finalised between the two families. I had no say. The fact is, asking for and giving dowry remains covertly and overtly rampant in our society.”

Sheeba, a 30-year-old corporate employee, says some “gifts were exchanged” in her marriage. In the seven years that she stayed married, her mother-in-law would taunt her every day. “She would say you have come with bags full of your own personal stuff, par dowry mein toh kuch leke nahi aayi‘.”

ALSO READ |Delhi: Woman set on fire, 10-year-old daughter calls cops

Had she given them ‘dowry’, Sheeba thinks her inter-faith marriage would have lasted. “I feel I would have been treated better.” She walked out of the marriage when her husband started to abuse her physically.

According to the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) 2019 data for IPC cases, a woman becomes a victim of dowry death roughly every one hour. Additionally, she becomes a victim of cruelty by her husband or in-laws every four minutes. The Delhi Police website mentions there were 94 dowry-deaths last year in the capital. According to an earlier NCRB data, in 2010, India reported the highest number of dowry deaths with 8,391 cases.

Origins of dowry

The Dowry Prohibition Act, 1961, defines dowry as the giving away of any property or “valuable security” by people “directly or indirectly” involved in a marriage or “by parents of either party” in connection to the alliance. This, however, does not include dower or mahr in which case the Muslim Personal Law (Shariat) applies to the people involved.

In her book Dowry Murder, celebrated historian Veena Talwar Oldenburg explores the root of this practice. “In precolonial India, dowry was not a “problem” but a support for women: a mark of their social status and a safety net.”

ALSO READ |Fashion designer urges people to ‘say no to dowry’ with latest bridal collection

The ghastly nature the practice has come to assume can be traced back to the colonial times when rights to own lands were sanctioned, subsequently making the Indian male “the dominant legal subject”. Thus, sons were preferred to daughters, mostly in agrarian Punjab. “Sons were the key to survival and prosperity in the relentlessly agrarian Punjab under the British,” Oldenburg writes, which in effect, raised their value and infused a sense of competitiveness in their wedding proposals. With the number of eligible men being handful, ‘mothers of daughters knew that a good dowry was now the net to secure “the catch.”’

“The idea that a groom’s family could make demands slowly infiltrated other traditional gift-giving occasions re-served by parents for their married daughters and their children.” This trend became worse and went on to be associated with violence and suicide of brides.

Portrayal in cinema

In the 2014 film 2 States — based on Chetan Bhagat’s book by the same name — the practice is alluded to in a short sequence mostly to establish the righteousness of the female lead. When at a wedding, Alia Bhatt’s Ananya finds out the groom’s family has demanded dowry, she launches into a tirade. The instance, however, is short-lived, the grotesque implication of the practice curtailed by the groom’s early realisation.

The issue is explored more deftly in Made In Heaven, a 2019 series centering around two wedding planners. Titled Price of Love, the episode shows the impunity with which dowry is practised across class, with the bride walking out of the wedding venue after the groom’s family demanded a huge sum in dowry. In the Rajkumar Santoshi-directed Lajja (2001), a wedding sequence comes to an end with Mahima Chaudhry giving a convincing ‘say-no-to-dowry’ performance.

These instances of denouncing dowry in pop culture may be encouraging, but they still fail approximating the morbidity it entails in real life.

Fighting the menace

National Commission for Women chairperson Rekha Sharma says. “Some people don’t know it is a crime. Secondly, families, instead of stressing on education and financial independence of women, just give dowry, especially when it comes to property — whose division must happen equally between sons and daughters. They think that by giving dowry, they have equalised it,” she tells indianexpress.com.

“There needs to be simplicity in marriages. When you are spending on your daughters’ education, give them the opportunity to earn their own money; that needs to be taught.”

Sharma explains the best legal course of action would be to approach the police. “Should they refuse to listen, there are bodies like NCW that should be approached.”

For more lifestyle news, follow us: Twitter: lifestyle_ie | Facebook: IE Lifestyle | Instagram: ie_lifestyle