[ET] Colleges to give ragging a decent burial

The article appeared in The Economic Times, June 21, 2007
Available on the e-paper

Priyanka Talwar NEW DELHI

WITH THE new academic year round the corner, colleges across the country are gearing up to prevent first-year students from any harassment in the name of ragging. What passes off as the relatively harmless singing and dancing in the universities of Delhi and Mumbai, manifests itself in varying psychological and physical forms in professional colleges across the country.

Keeping in mind the extent of the severity of ragging, the Raghavan Committee, constituted on the directive of the Supreme Court, has recommended the inclusion of ragging under the Indian Penal Code, now treating it as a criminal offence. Ragging has been defined as the systematic ritual physical and psychological abuse of first-year students in colleges by their seniors, with the purported intent of socially inducting the newcomers into the group. “The ragging taking place in the campuses of big universities, like Delhi University, represents barely 1% of the actual scenario across professional colleges in the country. The ragging in medical and engineering colleges is so severe at times that it would be appropriate to term it as an abuse of human rights,” Harsh Agarwal, founder, Coalition to Uproot Ragging from Education (CURE), said.

The recent Supreme Court ruling asked for a First Information Report (FIR) to be filed by the institutional authorities with the local police in case the victim or the victim’s family is not satisfied with the institutional arrangement for action. In Kerala University, the college principal can become the first accused in a ragging incident. “According to the university rules, if a ragging incident is reported to the college principal, he must take action within seven days of the complaint. If the principal fails to order an enquiry or take action, he becomes the first accused in the enquiry constituted at the university level,” Kerala University’s public relations officer SD Prins said.

At the Orissa University of Agriculture & Technology, students have to sign an undertaking during admission, pledging not to engage in any form of ragging. Any violation, mandates a punishment depending upon the severity of the offence. In the past, the college has fined a student Rs 20,000 and even expelled a student for a year. Going by the adage that prevention is better than cure, some colleges are trying to minimise interaction between first-year students and their seniors. At the National Institute of Technology (NIT), Calicut, freshers are escorted from their hostel to the classes by security personnel, to ensure no fresher is cornered by any senior student. Starting this July, freshers at NIT will have a separate hostel.

Not all colleges favour an exclusionist approach. Some colleges, like the Gujarat Vidyapeeth, Ahmedabad, strongly encourage interaction between freshers and seniors through on-campus community work such as cooking and cleaning, and prayer services held twice a day. “Ragging helps students know each other, and we felt that this could be promoted by a college policy itself,” Gujarat Vidyapeeth’s registrar Rajendra Khimani said.

Is the law to treat ragging as a criminal offence deterrent enough? Vidya Thatte, public relations officer, BJ Medical College, Pune, said that FIRs would help reduce such cases, but not guarantee a stop on ragging. “Whatever we might do to prevent ragging, the possibility of some black sheep in any college can’t be ruled out,” she said.

(With inputs from Saket Ambarkhane & Shreya Biswas)