Friday, May 29, 2009

UGC regulations against ragging



New Delhi, May 27: India has finalised regulations to curb ragging through expulsions, steep fines, imprisonment and the threat of permanently blacklisting offenders out of the higher education system.

Heads of educational institutions who neglect ragging complaints or fail to act against accused will be subjected to a combination of a departmental inquiry and penal action, the regulations stipulate.

The University Grants Commission (UGC) regulations on curbing ragging, finalised after discussions between the regulatory bodies that monitor higher education, are expected to be notified this week.

The regulations are India’s first central rules against ragging and aim to implement a Supreme Court ban on the menace. The regulations will be binding only on institutions offering courses recognised by the UGC.

But other regulatory bodies like the All India Council for Technical Education, the Medical Council of India, the Bar Council of India and the Pharmacy Council of India are also notifying similar regulations by early June.

The different sets of regulations will vary to take into account peculiarities of institutions offering different streams of courses, but will all specify identical punishments — those mentioned in the UGC rules.

Several states have anti-ragging laws but their effectiveness has repeatedly been questioned. The UGC regulations put in place a multiple-tier structure to combat ragging.

Each college has to set up an anti-ragging squad consisting of students, faculty and support staff that will investigate ragging complaints and will enjoy the power to raid trouble spots unannounced.

Institutions must each also set up an anti-ragging committee consisting of civil society representatives and members of the local police and media apart from representatives of different sections of the institution.

This committee will deliberate on the inquiry report of the anti-ragging squad and finalise a verdict along with the punishment. If a student is found guilty and asked to leave, any transfer certificate will include details of the crime committed to caution other institutions where the student may have applied.

A monitoring committee will manage the anti-ragging measures at the university level, while a district panel will be set up — made up of heads of institutions in the area — to ensure preparedness of all institutions.

A similar monitoring cell will be set up at the state level, and the UGC is starting its own anti-ragging cell that will co-ordinate nationally between different panels.

At the time of admission, students and their parents will have to submit affidavits stating they are aware of the new regulations and willing to accept their consequences.

Students will also be required to provide a school leaving certificate detailing whether they have shown violent tendencies or the potential to harm others while in school.

All freshers will be given telephone numbers of a national call centre that UGC chairman Sukhdeo Thorat today promised would be set up by June 15. Freshers will also be given mobile phone numbers of their wardens, other authorities and members of the anti-ragging squad and anti-ragging committee.

Each institution is required to set up a mentoring cell ahead of each academic session that will include seniors who will be responsible for assisting freshers. The regulations stipulate a mentor to fresher ratio of 1:6.

Institutions will have to distribute responsibility for freshers’ safety among their faculty. If students live outside the campus, the city will need to be carved out into slices that will come under the jurisdiction of different teachers.

FIRs must be filed against ragging accused by the head of the institution.

Tuesday, May 5, 2009

Testimonies - 3

1. "I remember how many years ago one of my cousin brothers was beaten up in his college for coming from a SC family. We were so horrified that my father went in for an affidavit and changed our surname from the original to a new one usually heard among the upper classes of the society."

2. "I never knew it could be so humiliating to belong to the reserved categories. Not only did they (the raggers) taunt me at the beginning of the session, made my life a hell by passing insulting comments and laughing at me as and when we met at the corridor, or the canteen or the common room, but also convinced some of my class mates to avoid sitting beside me and sharing class notes with me. However I managed to make some friends and thus somehow survived in the class"

3. "I don’t know how to put it in words…Because I am good looking and more or less have an appreciable sense of dressing, they went on to the extent of calling me a crow disguised as a peacock. I could not help but burst into tears."

4. "You wont believe how degraded these people can be. Some of them from a students political organization tried to pursuade me to join their campaign and on being refused threatened to make my stay at the university impossible by attacking me for my SC background and disreputing me on issues I have never been linked with. I finally had to yield to their proposal."

Testimonies - 2

I have two memories of what two of my students had to say about ragging that I feel I should share with you.

The first is of a class test that I set every year for engineering students when they had to write a paragraph on their first day at Jadavpur. The only girl student that year in Computer Science wrote that she had been taken up to the roof of the building by the ragging seniors and was given a garland and asked to perform a 'swayamvar' with them. She found the whole idea infinitely disgusting and ran away after tearing the garland to bits. But she survived the incident and claimed she had good relations with her own classmates and they protected her from any future problems of this kind.

The other incident was much more serious. When I was Head of the Department and running the support cell for disabled students and was also a member of the University Court, I received a call at almost midnight from a disabled English Honours student who had one ear and one eye functional. He said he had somehow run away from the general Men’s hostel after being severely ragged by a group of senior students and was calling from a phone booth. I could not go to his help myself at that point as a member of my family was hospitalized after a surgery earlier that evening and I had to stay on call. He said he had been attacked with lit cigarette stubs and made to go under the six beds in his room and to pretend he was on an underground train. The floor was apparently filthy with dust and cobwebs and he couldn’t see very well.

The lad however got swift redressal. I rang the Dean of Students, Rajat Ray who immediately went across with the Flying Squad to the Men’s Hostel, rescued the boy. Next morning, I spoke about the incident on the telephone with an EC member as I knew there was going to be an EC that day. He had also heard of the incident and asked me to ring and speak to the Vice Chancellor. I did this and the young man who was ring leader of the incident was suspended after a show cause notice. The disabled student was moved to the main campus and given a new room there.

Sajni Mukherji

Retired professor of English, Jadavpur University

Monday, May 4, 2009

Picking ragging scenes from films





This video has been compiled by Madhuja Mukherjee and Supratim Roy

Clips from
Holi (Ketan Mehta), Dil (Indra Kumar), Munnabhai MBBS (Rajkumar Hirani), Main Hoon Naa (Farah Khan) and Gulaal (Anurag Kashyap) respectively.

Is this ragging or bullying?

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1090504/jsp/nation/story_10913050.jsp

Bullying’ probe rolls in showpiece school

Sanawar, May 3: The Himachal Pradesh government today ordered an inquiry into the brutal attack on 11 students of Lawrence School, Sanawar, by seven seniors last month.

“On April 25, when a basketball match was being played on the school campus, some senior boys (Class XII students) had asked the junior boys (Class XI students) to cheer the players, but they refused. The seniors decided to teach the juniors a lesson,” said Vivek Chandel, the sub-divisional magistrate, Solan, who is part of the three-member probe team.

The Solan deputy commissioner, Amandeep Garg, is heading the team that also includes superintendent of police S.P.S. Verma.

According to unconfirmed reports, the junior students were beaten up that night by the seven seniors with wet belts, hockey sticks and rods.

The eardrums of six students were damaged and one has lost 70 per cent hearing, the reports said.

Haleena Bajwa, the mother of one of the victims, said: “They were beaten up with rods and belts. My son’s eardrums are perforated.”

Another mother, Shalu Gupta, said her son had “scars” on his back, hips and legs. “He is traumatised.”

Principal Praveen Vashisht confirmed that the boys had suffered “serious injuries.” “They had ear injuries and there were marks on their bodies,” he said.

The Sanawar school, located in the Kasauli hills in Solan district about 80km from Chandigarh, is one of the country’s best-known and counts among its alumni Jammu and Kashmir chief minister Omar Abdullah, chief election commissioner Navin Chawla and actor Sanjay Dutt.

“I am ashamed that such an incident took place in our school. I took action as soon as possible. An inquiry was ordered within 24 hours. All the evidence was against the accused students, who were rusticated within 30 hours of the incident,” Vashisht said.

The seven students belong to influential families of New Delhi, Chandigarh and Punjab and one of them was the school’s deputy head boy.

However, the principal denied this was a case of “ragging”. “You call it ragging and we call it a bullying. But such incidents should not happen anywhere in any institution,” Vashisht said.

Chief minister Prem Kumar Dhumal agreed that “prima facie it is not a case of ragging but a clash of students”.

Friday, May 1, 2009

Audio Interviews - 3

Interview in Bangla with Abhishek Das of Jadavpur University
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Audio Interviews - 2

Interview in Bangla with Nilanjana Gupta, member of anti-ragging cell, Jadavpur University
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Interview in Bangla with Kushal Banerjee, Joint Director, SAVE
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Same interview with Kushal Banerjee, in English
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Interview in Bangla with Rajat Ray, Dean of Students, Jadavpur University
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Same interview with Rajat Ray, in English
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Audio interviews - 1

Radio JU programme in Bangla on ragging with Samarpita, Madhabendra Nath Mitra, Rinku Pathak and Sujit Kumar Mondal
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Radio JU programme in Bangla on sexual harassment with Suchetana, Shefali Moitra and Ipshita Chanda
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Radio JU programme in Bangla on youth violence and performance with Samantak Das, Nandini Mukhopadhyay, Suman Mukhopadhyay, Vikram Iyengar and Soumyak Kanti De Biswas
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Radio JU programme in Bangla on youth violence with Sohom and Sohini
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Radio JU programme in Bangla on reality show and youth violence with Subhodeep, Raj Chakraborty and Kohinoor Sen Borat.
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