Vishnupriya Bhandaram - When a 17-year-old worries enough to kill herself over JEE, we must question our own education
On Thursday, a day after the results of JEE were
announced, a 17-year-old in Jaipur killed herself — the police said that she
wanted to pursue a BSc degree in astrophysics. What’s worrying is that the
police said that it was “strange” that she killed herself over that because it
seemed to him that "one can also become an astrophysicist after graduating
from an IIT.” What Harshit Bharati (who is investigating the case) and perhaps
countless parents and peers who have heard or read about the girl’s demise are
unable to understand is the mental anguish of a child who probably does not
want to go to IIT at all.
In a six-month study conducted on undergraduate students
from cities such as Chennai and Delhi, researcher Arti Sarma found that a total
of 14.5 percent endorsed suicidal ideation and 12.3 percent had admitted to
having deliberately hurt/kill themselves.
These
figures are grim, yet quite telling in light of the burgeoning suicide rate
among students. In Kota, the engineering prep Mecca, the NCRB 2014 report marks
an unprecedented 61 percent rise in suicides related to failure in competitive
examinations. Out of the 100 suicide deaths in Kota in 2014, 45 such suicides
were committed by students owing to failure in examinations.
Parental pressure is social pressure and quite simply
put, stress. Where does this stem from? An individual perceives certain
expectations of oneself from the environment. When an individual feels unable
to deliver on those expectations — whether perceived or real, the result is
stress.
Coaching centres in Kota enroll close to 1.5 lakh
students every year, despite the rise in the number of suicides. Sarma explains
through her research that the culture of education in India is "fiercely
competitive" because of the "density of India's population set
against limited availability of resources including jobs, seats at prestigious
colleges, and opportunities to work abroad".
Ravi Kumar makes a pertinent observation in Neoliberalism, Education and the Politics of Capital:
Searching Possibilities of Resistance, that “competition has been made
guiding ethics of everyday life” — so it becomes imperative that the Indian kid
should get into the best colleges, best jobs and make the best money.
Former IITian and now photographer-documentary
filmmaker, Amrit Vatsa says that most people go to IIT not to join it on the
noble pursuit of knowledge, but because the MBBS and engineering programmes are
the easiest ways to make big bucks — perhaps the final dagger of neoliberalism,
causing an individual with interests to become an individual with capital. “We
Indians want to start making more money as quickly as possible. So, we want to
do engineering. And because IITs are known as the best colleges, we all want to
go there. It is not linked to ‘learning engineering’, it is all about making
money,” he adds.
"You are making me sad," says Vatsa in
the middle of our conversation. I ask him why. "It's all about the parents
really, there are parents who have seen the world better and there are parents
who have not. If only more parents could be educated about the various things
their children could do, and become great in life, there would a broader set of
talents in India. I went to IIT because I could, that feeling of 'not everyone
can get into it' is a good enough egoistic reason. But also, I could never
muster the courage to tell my dad I wanted to learn English literature. It
sounds silly, but well, I never spoke to my family about what I wanted to
learn. And my family did not want to give up on my talent of getting high marks
in written exams. It took me so much time to finally give up on that 'talent'
of mine," he tells me...
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