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India education: Dalit student suicide
Caste-discrimination is undermining India's efforts to uplift the oppressed through quotas in higher education.
NEW DELHI, India Jaspreet Singh, a young student from a caste once considered "untouchable" by other Hindus, was in his last year of medical school when his life began to fall apart.
A talented student, and his family's brightest hope for clawing their way into the middle class, he was stunned to find that he had failed community medicine, one of his easiest subjects. But he was even more devastated by the alleged reason: His professor was determined to flunk him because of his caste.
Like most students from the Dalit castes, Singh had suffered the sly digs and subtle slights of his classmates in silence for years at the Goverment Medical College (Chandigarh). His professor's alleged claim that he would never allow Singh to get there was the last straw.
Singh hung himself from the ceiling fan in the bathroom in the college library, writing in his suicide note that he could no longer bear the insults and discrimination he'd endured from two fellow students and his community medicine professor, Dr. N.K. Goel. (All three have been charged with abetting Singh's suicide, which is a crime under the Indian penal code, but no ruling has been issued and the accused maintain that they are innocent).
"The college says he couldn't cope with the coursework, but he did fine in all his other subjects," said Jaspreet's sister, Balwinder Kaur. "In surgery he got 80 percent marks."
Sadly, cases like Jaspreet's are all too common, according to the Insight Foundation, a group of young Dalits who are working to eliminate discrimination in India's higher education system.
No official effort has been made to determine how many of the more than 16,000 school and college students who have killed themselves over the past four years hail from India's historically oppressed castes, and only one study, covering only the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, has investigated discrimination on campus.
But the Insight Foundation believes that a disproportionate number of the students committing suicides are Dalits, and its members allege that caste discrimination, a dirty secret, is ubiquitous at India's top universities even as the government works to expand access to higher education with quotas, or reservations, for historically oppressed groups.
"The problem which we face in elite institutions is much worse," said Anoop Kumar, the Insight Foundation's national coordinator, and a Dalit himself. "These elite institutions are considered to be very prestigious, and the Dalit students who enter there are thought to be intruding into that space through reservations they don't deserve to be there, this is such a competitive place, this is such a meritorious place, and these guys have come through quota. So the hatred and hostility is much more."
FULL STORY: India Education | Student Suicide | Dalit
Caste-discrimination is undermining India's efforts to uplift the oppressed through quotas in higher education.
NEW DELHI, India Jaspreet Singh, a young student from a caste once considered "untouchable" by other Hindus, was in his last year of medical school when his life began to fall apart.
A talented student, and his family's brightest hope for clawing their way into the middle class, he was stunned to find that he had failed community medicine, one of his easiest subjects. But he was even more devastated by the alleged reason: His professor was determined to flunk him because of his caste.
Like most students from the Dalit castes, Singh had suffered the sly digs and subtle slights of his classmates in silence for years at the Goverment Medical College (Chandigarh). His professor's alleged claim that he would never allow Singh to get there was the last straw.
Singh hung himself from the ceiling fan in the bathroom in the college library, writing in his suicide note that he could no longer bear the insults and discrimination he'd endured from two fellow students and his community medicine professor, Dr. N.K. Goel. (All three have been charged with abetting Singh's suicide, which is a crime under the Indian penal code, but no ruling has been issued and the accused maintain that they are innocent).
"The college says he couldn't cope with the coursework, but he did fine in all his other subjects," said Jaspreet's sister, Balwinder Kaur. "In surgery he got 80 percent marks."
Sadly, cases like Jaspreet's are all too common, according to the Insight Foundation, a group of young Dalits who are working to eliminate discrimination in India's higher education system.
No official effort has been made to determine how many of the more than 16,000 school and college students who have killed themselves over the past four years hail from India's historically oppressed castes, and only one study, covering only the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, has investigated discrimination on campus.
But the Insight Foundation believes that a disproportionate number of the students committing suicides are Dalits, and its members allege that caste discrimination, a dirty secret, is ubiquitous at India's top universities even as the government works to expand access to higher education with quotas, or reservations, for historically oppressed groups.
"The problem which we face in elite institutions is much worse," said Anoop Kumar, the Insight Foundation's national coordinator, and a Dalit himself. "These elite institutions are considered to be very prestigious, and the Dalit students who enter there are thought to be intruding into that space through reservations they don't deserve to be there, this is such a competitive place, this is such a meritorious place, and these guys have come through quota. So the hatred and hostility is much more."
FULL STORY: India Education | Student Suicide | Dalit
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