Co-authored by Prithvi Vatsalya and Anuska Roy
Trigger Warning: Mentions of suicide, institutional death, attempted suicide, mental health conditions
“I think the strangest thing of all is how there is no collective mourning of the loss of student lives, rather it is always an individual lost. Until we recognise that in these individual losses hides an institutional interplay of caste, class among other things, we will continue to lose young lives to institutional murder,” says Leo*, a student pursuing their Masters.
India has one of the largest youth populations in the world. I am sure you have heard this before. Young people are also widely recognised as the future of our nation and the globe. I am sure you have this one before too. So, what sort of a future can young’uns like us expect in mera Bharat mahan?
GOI Revokes The MANF Scholarship, But At What Cost?
This question becomes especially important when we look at the current climate on Indian campuses and how it’s affecting many students. To begin with, the Maulana Azad National Fellowship (MANF) has been scrapped by the central government on the flimsy ground that it overlaps with other fellowship schemes.
To understand why this is nothing but an excuse, we need to know a little more about the MANF. It’s a scheme that provided financial assistance to students from 6 minority communities (Muslim, Buddhist, Christian, Jain, Parsi and Sikh), for a period of 5 years, while they pursued their MPhil and PhD programs.
According to Smriti Irani, former education minister and current Women & Child Development minister: “As per the data provided by the UGC*, 6,722 candidates were selected under the fellowship scheme between 2014-15 and 2021-22 with a cumulative disbursal of ₹738.85 crore.”
(*University Grants Commission)
You tell us: do thousands of students and their research interests not matter anymore? If they do, then why was the MANF done away with so hurriedly? If they don’t, then why pretend like they do? Naturally, student protests erupted in campuses across the capital city of Delhi, among other campuses in the country.
Resisting undemocratic acts is an act of great courage. If young people are being denied our rightful claim to a bright future, won’t we be angry? To quote Shakespeare: “If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?”
Importance Of Affirmative Action For Marginalised Students
Scholarships are an important way through which students from marginalised communities are able to access higher education which may become incredibly exclusionary at times. Affirmative action, which means providing resources to groups that have been disadvantaged, is an integral way through which educational spaces can be made accessible to all.
Students from AISA protesting the removal of MANF were detained by police forces in New Delhi. A social media post by the collective reads, “The announcement made by the Union Minister of Minority Affairs Smriti Irani is not that of a simple discontinuation of a government scheme, it is the very denial of social justice by the BJP government that disenfranchises already marginalised students from minority sections.”
As if the MANF being rolled back was not enough, multiple student suicides across different cities, from Bhubaneshwar to Kota, have been making the news too. Can you imagine what a young person feels like when they read about their peers dying? Is this what we have to look forward to?
Student Suicides Or Institutional Murder?
“Student suicide” is a misnomer. Because, the way we see it, these are nothing but “institutional murders”. Educational institutes, which are supposed to train and nurture students, are killing them.
These harsh spaces are leaving pushing their students to end their lives because they feel so darn their students so hopeless about their futures that often they feel like they have no choice but to end their lives.
Moreover, there is very little support that students who are struggling with mental health get from their institutions. It is not just a lack of resources, but also a lack of awareness which makes these institutionsuniversities a scary place for young people who find no help when they are in need of it the most.
Nico* a student says,
“I have had a failed suicide attempt twice this year. Do I still have anything to look forward to? No. Do I get any sort of support from the institutions I am a part of? No.”
Where Does The Pressure For Students End?
Three students between the ages of 16-18, studying in Kota’s coaching institutes, nay factories, died by suicide. Two of them were staying in adjacent rooms in the same paying guest accommodation. Think about the tremendous amount of stress they were under to have taken such a drastic step!
Moreover, in the past six months more than ten medical students have died by suicide. If you search ‘medical student suicide’ on Google, article after article lays out the gruesome details of how young people took their own lives because of systemic pressure.
Divya*, a medical college student herself says, “You’ll find around 35%-45% medical students are medical students because their parents wanted them to be. Most of these parents aren’t doctors themselves but they want to be able to say that their child is. Doctors are no longer made because they want to work to heal people. They are made by ambitious parents who want to climb the social ladder through their children.
Our institutions are staunch followers of “tough love” to the extent where the love is gone and it’s just tough. We are all pieces of coal which they believe need to be turned to diamond by putting us through tremendous pressure. Instead, we pass out as broken pieces of stone.”
Does University Reputation Hold More Value Than Student Lives?
If we speak of Bhubaneshwar, a Tweet alleges that 2 students have died by suicide in just the past couple of weeks. Instead of addressing the grave issue at hand, the institute in question (KIIT), allegedly hushed up the whole issue.
Preksha* says,
“Instead of structures that nourish we have structures that weed out differences, that churn out the sliver of normalcy we celebrate day in and day out as the normalcy we desire for all of our children. This spike in student suicides across the country is perceivable for its media exposure, but our institutions have been snuffing out our will to live for a long time now.”.
Does its reputation really matter more than the lives of its students? This is not limited to a particular institution or state. Students from all over the country have been demanding access to equitable mental health care and community support but educational institutions have been ignoringrejectingrepressing these demands for decades now.
When young students start dropping like flies, we can be sure that something is really, really rotten with the Indian education system. And, why should students have to die before we realise that there is a rot in the system? It’s time we do something about this, not tomorrow, not the day after, but NOW!
*Student names have been changed to protect their identity