It is a rat race and your value as a human being is directly proportional to the marks you score in the last test.
“Students looked like people hijacked and put in concentration camps.”
That is how the Prof. Neerada Reddy led committee described the conditions in private coaching centres in its reports after studying the reasons for student deaths in December 2007. The committee reported that the students were facing ‘inhuman and pathetic treatment’ and suggested multiple measures to stop the spate of suicides in colleges across the state of united Andhra Pradesh.
Ten years later, 50 students have died in the last two months in coaching centres in the region. This is alarming given NCRB data shows that 333 students committed suicide in 2016. These are only the reported suicides while educationists claim that the real number might be even higher. Most of these suicides took place in private coaching institutions.
Two private coaching centres – Chaitanya and Narayana group of institutions – dominate this list. Both of them were rival coaching centres till 2014, when they merged to get a complete monopoly on the coaching classes for engineering and medical entrance examinations in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana.
The Narayana institutions are owned by P Narayana, the minister for Municipal administration and Urban Development in the ruling TDP Government. With no political experience prior to 2014, he was given the ministry because he largely funded the TDP election campaign in 2014.
Incidentally, Narayana’s daughter is married to HRD and Education minister Ganta Srinivasa Rao’s son, who played down the statistics. Srinivasa Rao said that ‘love failures’ and ‘parental pressure’ were the reasons for the suicides.
But Srinivasa Rao did not speak about the elephant in the room: the private coaching centres – many of which are owned by his own in-laws – and the pressure students face while attending them.
I lost four valuable teenage years in one of these coaching centres. It is a rat race in there, where your value as a human being is directly proportional to the marks you score in the last test.
Students are forced to study for 17-18 hours a day and write 10 exams a month with hardly any holidays in between. Severe punishments are meted even for being a little late to class. If your marks dropped because you were ill, you risked being humiliated by the principal in front of everyone.
Hundreds of students sit in a single classroom. There are CCTV cameras, wardens, and invigilators constantly spying on every act. Privacy was an alien right in these spaces. Marks were publicly displayed and you were subjected to routine humiliation by fellow students.
All the suicides have been recorded under Section 174 of the IPC (which deals with unnatural death) and not a single case has been filed against the college managements.
No punitive action has been taken against anyone so far. Does this mean no one is responsible for the hundreds of suicides that took place? The HRD minister has accepted that more than 150 hostels being run by Narayana institutions are illegal and have no permits. The number of illegal hostels run by other institutes could be even more. The collusion between corporate coaching centres-politics fits in neatly with the privatisation of education that is actively promoted by the TDP government.
Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu, who wants to develop the state into a ‘knowledge-based society’ is a known votary of the private education and has dismantled public education systematically over the years. There are only 500 government colleges across the state while there are over 3500 private colleges.
The private colleges charge very high fees, which is a burden for middle class parents who would want their child to be part of the knowledge- based economy in a society where contestations over land have become intense.
Aspirations in the knowledge economy are also closely linked to different caste groups. It is this aspirational nature which forces the parents to pressure their children. The Neerada Reddy committee had observed in its report that most of the students who had committed suicide were from lower middle class and rural families.
Most of the suicides recorded were in and around Vijayawada, Guntur and Hyderabad which are advanced capitalist societies providing cannon fodder to the knowledge based economy. Reports say around 500-700 students attempted suicide in Vijayawada in the last 5 years.
The HRD minister should look closely at the findings of the Chakrapani and Ratna Kumari committee, which submitted its report in May. The recommendations made by the committee also include the reduction of study hours and tests, counsellors in every college, stopping the public display of marks and performance-based shuffling of classes.
However, even this report failed to look into how the privatisation of education and high fees affected the suicides.
Rahul Maganti is a freelance writer based in Vijayawada.
Good piece.
education today is the most commercialised business in india, followed by health care, politics, religion and media.