KRANTIKARI YUVA SANGATHAN (KYS)
DELHI UNIT OF ALL INDIA REVOLUTIONARY
YOUTH ORGANISATION
T-44,
Near Gopal Dairy, Baljeet Nagar, New Delhi-110008. Ph. : 9312654851.
PRESS RELEASE
Date: 21st Jan 2013
Education Apartheid Exposed & Challenged by Correspondence Students of DU
Correspondence
Students Speak Out Against Skewed & Discriminatory Education Policies that
Deny them Regular Education
Students of distance learning stream (Correspondence
mode) have started a campaign which will culminate in a protest rally on 21/01/2013.
We are campaigning against the discriminatory policies adopted by the Delhi University
(DU) administration and Indian state against the students studying through the
distance mode. After our protest demonstration we will submit a memorandum to
the Vice Chancellor (VC), demanding that immediate and efficient steps be taken
to address our grievances.
Contrary to popular conception, the
Correspondence student community does not concern primarily of those will to
pursue studies part-time. This is a myth peddled by the ruling class to hide
the ugly reality of its dual education policy. The truth is that the most of
the students studying through the distance learning mode are the ones who in
fact dearly wish to study in the regular colleges but are forced to enroll in
the correspondence mode because they are denied admission in regular colleges.
It is matter of great shame and shock that today the number of students
studying in the regular courses in Delhi University is little more than 100,000
whereas around 400,000 are forced to pursue their higher education through the
distance learning mode. This means that
for every 1 student enrolled in a regular course, 4 are studying through the
distance learning mode. This along
with the fact that in the past 30 years almost no new colleges that offer
higher education at the graduation level, reflects that the government is not
serious about ensuring quality education to all after high school.
Our state boasts of building a
broad based and quality higher education system, but the truth is that today we
have an extremely elitist university system that takes pride in its exclusivity.
Gross inadequacy of seats in the regular colleges means that year by year the
cut-offs are skyrocketing. This cut-off system has become ridiculous to the
point that even a student who scores 75% marks has to struggle to secure a seat
for him/herself. Clearly the authorities who plan our education system are
going by the logic of elimination, i.e. one can get selected not by proving
oneself to be good, but only through proving that he or she is better than the
rest. This logic of selection based on elimination which the shortage of
college seats is creating has placed the
student community under extreme pressure, leading to depression, low self
esteem and in the extreme situations suicide among them. Today ‘to succeed at
all costs, or basically, at the cost of others’ has become the supreme virtue
for the students, an attitude hardly conducive for the building of a harmonious
society based upon virtues like equality, mutual respect, and love.
Of course, the system of elimination through cut-offs also presumes that a
student who could not do well at the school level would remain and deserves to
remain a ‘poor’ student at the graduation
level. The chances of academic success of a student at the high school level
(and beyond it too) are based upon the kind of educational facilities, teachers
and amount of time made available to him to study. It has been observed that
the majority of students studying through the distance learning belong to the
most oppressed and vulnerable classes of the society. In reality, those youth
who qualify through DU’s cut-offs are those who come from the more affluent
classes of the society, and hence, study in top-notch expensive private
schools, avail state of the art education technologies, purchase the best private
tuitions/coaching etc. In stark contrast to this, children from among the
toiling masses are forced to pursue education at run-down cheap private schools
or ill-maintained and poorly run government schools. Poverty forces many of these youth to work part-time as well. All this
means that despite constituting the overwhelming majority of the total number
of students, very few working class youth manage to cross the iron curtain of
cut-off marks.
Crippled at the
level of school education, the majority of India’s school pass-outs continue to
face exclusion and denial of their education needs and rights at the level of
higher education. The state’s
policies continue to remain elitist and class blind as it bullishly pursues a
dual-education program and maintains ‘centres of excellence’ where a select few
are nurtured and provided holistic education. Even the modification of the
10+2+3 system of education by the Delhi University has been done with the
objective of facilitating the smooth transition from the Indian education
system to the European system for the (small segment of) students aspiring to
pursue post graduation abroad. Of course, the University did not consider the
impact this step could have, i.e. in terms of further intensifying the inequality
between correspondence and regular college students.
In the School
of Open learning nothing seems to work. Our course material is old and outdated
and ill suited to the demands of the job market. We often get our reading
material late; the library facility is inadequate given our huge numbers; our
results often come out late, so that those among us seeking to take admission
elsewhere after graduation often miss the admission deadlines. Moreover, very few
courses are offered to us and some important courses like Honors in History,
Hindi literature, Sociology, etc. are not available. We have nothing by way of
cultural activities or sports. The Personal Contact Program (PCP) is a joke; we
get classes only on the weekends. The classrooms are invariably overcrowded and
the teachers are all on contract. As if this sheer inefficacy and neglect was
not enough, we have to face humiliation too. SOL (School of Open Learning) staff
is always impolite, as if they wish to impress upon us that being
Correspondence students we are entitled to no self-esteem. When we go for classes
to the regular colleges on weekends, the security staff chases us out of the
campus as soon as our classes are over; we are not allowed to sit in the lawns
at all, whereas the same is not demanded of the regular students. For the SOL
students there are separate centers for boys and girls. “This is to protect the
girl students”, we are told, but what is inconceivable to us is, why are there
co-ed colleges for the regular students then? It seems we are being told that because
we are from the lower rungs of society, we are not capable of decent behavior towards
women, and that this virtue is exclusive to the rich who attend regular (co-ed)
colleges.
We see this
dual education policy: regular colleges for the children of the rich and
distance learning for the children of the toiling masses as nothing less than a
sinister attempt to deny the children of the latter a chance to move up the
class ladder. Faced with this desperate situation, words like educational
apartheid, educational untouchability begin to seem increasingly relevant to us
and we feel that to oppose this rigid and unjust system is not just our express
necessity but also our bounden duty. The discrimination and neglect that we are
facing is not the result of carelessness or human error. It is quite apparent from the way state
policies (the dual education system, four year under-graduate program, course
restructuring, semester system, etc.) are being framed that our plight is the
result of a pre-conceived and well thought out plan. Our protest rally is only
the beginning, meant to serve as a warning not only to the University
administration but also the state. We are submitting a memorandum to the
Vice-Chancellor of the Delhi University, hoping that he as well as the state will
respond in the earnest. If not, we would be forced to intensify our agitation
and take it outside the campus onto the streets and localities from where we
come.
Sujit Kumar
Member
Delhi State Committee
Krantikari Yuva Sangathan
Ph:
9312654851, 9313730069 
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