July 08, 2012
Why there's an alarming rash of suicides among Dalit students
Stephanie Nolen in The Globe and Mail:
The sharply truncated life of Anil Meena was marked by a ferocious tenacity.
From the mud house in rural Rajasthan, where he grew up in a family of subsistence farmers, he made his way first to school and then to the top of his class. He studied with monomaniacal intensity and passed the entrance exam to the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), the most prestigious of India’s professional colleges – an achievement almost unfathomable in the largely illiterate aboriginal community from which he came.
At AIIMS, he battled through classes where he couldn’t understand a word of the English being spoken and pored over a dictionary to get through textbooks. When an arbitrary rule change – that just happened to affect only students from backgrounds such as his – cost him a passing grade in a crucial exam, he tried repeatedly to meet his course director, his friends say. He sat outside the man’s office for four or five hours at a time for a week.
But Mr. Meena had come up against something his intelligence and perseverance could not overcome: Students of his kind are not welcome at AIIMS, no more than they are at other prestigious Indian universities. They rarely graduate. No one was prepared to help him succeed.
On March 3, Mr. Meena hung himself from the fan in his small dormitory room. He was 22.
Read the rest here.
Posted by Zujaja Tauqeer at 09:26 AM | Permalink
Comments
How outrageous and tragic. These talented young people giving up. And the professors and students treating them in demeaning, despicable ways.
Posted by: Louise Gordon | Jul 9, 2012 1:07:03 AM
The problem is that the massive increase in quotas means a host of students who are barely prepared for higher education are entering these institutes. OTOH, while the politicians had no trouble raising quotas before elections, they did not see it fit to provide money and a mandate for these institutions of higher learning to provide educational, financial, social, and psychological support for these students
In reality, though, I find it hard to see how students scoring 60-70% marks can hope to do well in such high stress environments, where people who are already prepared struggle. We need to repair school education for low caste students before expecting the college system to absorb them seamlessly.
Posted by: addicted | Jul 9, 2012 7:23:30 PM
Addicted, I’ll have to disagree. The article reports several instances where the problem is not the lack of preparation but rank prejudice. That the system is not working is evident from the fact that it takes Stephanie Nolan, a Canadian journalist, to pursue and highlight this problem. Where are all the meritorious upper-caste journalists from the leading Indian universities? Or are they too busy covering celebrities, India's macroeconomic performance, and defending their privileges?
Posted by: Namit | Jul 9, 2012 9:21:40 PM
addicted, I wonder if you realize that your words incarnate the kind of prejudice the students who are the subject of this article encounter? That you bring many assumptions to what you write, assumptions that prompt me to guess you did not read the article with attention once you established it was about students who entered elite educational systems via set-asides, and suicided because they couldn't cut it. I hope you will read the article again -- or, just read it -- to see how high the dead boys scored, and to understand that the fellow feeling and respect they deserved could not have been mandated. The scorn and profound discouragement they received ought to have been penalized, however.
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Jul 10, 2012 2:34:12 AM
India has one of the highest rates of suicide in the world, especially in the age group of college students. But these deaths stand out because of the clear connection, often described in suicide notes, with the discrimination the victim endured.
This is a pretty number-free demonstration of a suicide "rash". Right, twenty suicides among Dalits in four years. And we're talking sixteen institutions, don't know which but including at least AIIMS and the IITs. So how does that compare to the non-SC/ST students at the same institutions? To college students nationwide?
I don't think reading from a few suicide letters substitutes for those basic numbers. Not yet convinced this isn't another Foxconn type story.
Posted by: prasad | Jul 10, 2012 4:25:09 AM
Also want to underscore the first para of addicted's post. There isn't much, comparatively speaking, I prefer about the american way of doing affirmative action, but this issue is an exception. Providing more academic, counseling, monetary etc support to admitted students from disadvantaged students is *very* important. it's extremely short sighted to expect that admitting a student to college will solve his problems by itself.
Also, this story by nature loses the important point that -most- sc/st students are going to commit suicide, like other students, but at higher rates, because of exam results and grades. Whatever the underlying social problem, that's the modal proximate cause (at least assuming the Dean Ratched in the story isn't a generic phenomenon) since that's what the largest fraction of youth suicides in India are about (as opposed to bullying or unrequited love or angst or what have you). In the highly score competitive environment, someone scoring systematically and clearly lower than his peers needs a) extra academic training in college and b) extra counseling and guidance re exam scores. Addicted's raising the issue of scores is extremely important, and not to be ignored as "prejudiced" simply because it doesn't adopt an appropriately pious or apologetic tone.
Posted by: prasad | Jul 10, 2012 4:51:27 AM
Like Prasad, I wish it wasnt such a remarkably number-free article. Every suicide is a tragedy and discrimination is real and painful, but in a story that fits so perfectly with our expectations and prejudices, how hard would it have been to find some numbers?..or if the numbers dont exist, then stay away from rashes and epidemics and just present one or two heart wrenching anecdotes AS anecdotes? Too much to ask?
Posted by: omar | Jul 10, 2012 10:20:22 AM
Prasad and Omar, I took the point of the article to be not quite about suicide culture in the topmost Indian educational institutes, and how it is that ill-prepared students who entered via set-asides and performed poorly partook of that culture. Rather, the point seemed to be that the two boys the writer focused on had knocked the top off the entrance exams, devoted lots of time to learning enough English to compete in a privileged environment where English is the lingua franca, turned in very solid academic performances that should have troubled absolutely no one, and were yet sabotaged. I agree with you that a story about the suicides of lowest-caste boys who were also low-performing, in the context of performance-related student suicide across society, would have benefited from more of a quant approach -- indeed, it could have been told in a single chart.
But that is not this story. I doubt even Edward Tufte could design the chart that showed the numerical aspect of old men of high rank using that rank to hideously discourage eminently qualified very young men aiming for the kind of education that would make their intellectual gifts flourish and save their desperate families. That's not numbers, that's Dostoyevsky.
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Jul 10, 2012 12:18:28 PM
Prasad and Omar, I took the point of the article to be not quite about suicide culture in the topmost Indian educational institutes, and how it is that ill-prepared students who entered via set-asides and performed poorly partook of that culture. Rather, the point seemed to be that the two boys the writer focused on had knocked the top off the entrance exams, devoted lots of time to learning enough English to compete in a privileged environment where English is the lingua franca, turned in very solid academic performances that should have troubled absolutely no one, and were yet sabotaged. I agree with you that a story about the suicides of lowest-caste boys who were also low-performing, in the context of performance-related student suicide across society, would have benefited from more of a quant approach -- indeed, it could have been told in a single chart.
But that is not this story. I doubt even Edward Tufte could design the chart that showed the numerical aspect of old men of high rank using that rank to hideously discourage eminently qualified very young men aiming for the kind of education that would make their intellectual gifts flourish and save their desperate families. That's not numbers, that's Dostoyevsky.
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Jul 10, 2012 9:46:45 PM
Elatia, if some neocon writes a story about women being abused in a Pakistani school, it may well be true, but you may keep a certain skepticism in the back of your mind, knowing how eager we are to expect such a story. Maybe the same principle should apply here. The story fits TOO neatly into our expectations and preconceptions. My default expectation is that more will come out if we dig deeper and the story will be more complex than it looks. Thats my expectation of mass media personal interest stories in general.
What makes you so sure that the situation of these two suicides is exactly how you you just described it? It may be worth waiting for the second or third story before we make up our minds so completely.
Posted by: omar | Jul 11, 2012 12:37:08 AM
Well, Omar -- the story gave details of only two boys' lives. Neither was doing badly in school, neither was unprepared -- academically -- to be there. Both sounded like highly distinguished students. In the case of one, a nasty back and forth with a professor over a misunderstanding about the worth of a single exam to the total score accumulated seemed to be the problem. A kid higher up the social scale would know how to finesse that situation -- it's an upper class skill, and you learn it from your own well-heeled elders. Of course there's more to the story than the writer knew or wrote. Even if the story plays to the same Western-Liberal-hoping-to-sob-and-jeer gallery as stories of crimes against women in Pakistan play, does that make it false? Or just perhaps sentimental? And, it's sad but true that the world does expect stories of hideous treatment of lower-downs by higher-ups in India -- how nice it would be, if these stories were made up. We can read also about the hateful behavior of Southern whites to African-Americans -- these stories too are expected, and they are not made up. But in both cases the greater interest lies in the brutality of the situation than in the banality of the expose.
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Jul 11, 2012 1:16:02 AM
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