Campus gender politics

By Asmita Das

Universities are often seen as relatively safe spaces for students from all genders to interact more freely than they would be able to off campus. Many students get together to imagine a more equal society, one that does not tolerate discrimination, by organising demonstrations, awareness programmes, or social events. But recent cases of sexual violence against women on university campuses have raised questions regarding the safety of the university space, and revealed the pressing need for gender sensitisation through active and efficient gender cells in the form of Gender Sensitisation Committees Against Sexual Harassment (GSCASH).

In recent months, the molestation and rape of female students on the grounds of Jadavpur University (JU) in Kolkata, English and Foreign Languages University (EFLU) in Hyderabad and Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in Delhi have led to student protests demanding better mechanisms to appropriately address such cases at universities. At JU, a female student reported to the university and police that she was assaulted, dragged to the boy’s hostel and molested by a group of male students during an annual festival organised by the Arts Faculty Students Union. Her male companion was also beaten up (on 28 August 2014). At EFLU, a female student was reportedly gang-raped in the Men’s Hostel after going there to visit a friend (on 31 October 2014). And at JNU, a PhD student reported that she was sexually assaulted by a research scholar and blackmailed to hide the incident (12 November 2014). While these cases are not the first incidents of sexual violence on campus, they have drawn attention to the fact that university administrations are ill-equipped to appropriately address gender violence.

University campuses are among the few spaces where there can be, and often is, some semblance of gender equality.

Reactions to each of the cases differed. Jadavpur University launched an internal investigation, but authorities were slow to respond and did not take immediate action against the perpetrators. Instead, female representatives of the university paid the girl an unauthorised visit, and questioned her presence near a boy’s hostel on the night of the incident, asking her what she was wearing and whether she was drunk. This violated the Vishaka Guidelines against Sexual Harassment at Workplace, which condemns the use of external pressure on the victim or the accused during the investigation period. The police had started an investigation, but also did not take immediate action based on the victim’s identification of the perpetrators.

JU Students were enraged by the university’s slow and inappropriate actions and called for a fast-track independent investigative committee that would look into the incident and make its proceedings public. They also staged protests demanding a public statement from the vice chancellor (VC) as to why a proper investigation was not taking place. When the VC ignored the protests, students began to stage an indefinite sit-in in front of his office. In the early hours of 17 September, police and unidentified men in civilian dress forcefully broke up the protests, injuring several students and arresting over 35. Reportedly, few female police officers were present, and students – male and female – were beaten and molested by male officers and the other men in plain clothes. This only enraged students more, leading them to organise further protests to demand the VC’s resignation. Eventually, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee visited the JU campus on 12 January 2015 to announce to the students that the VC would resign.

At EFLU officials decided to form a separate taskforce, specifically for dealing with the reported rape, instead of reviving the GSCASH which had been dissolved in 2012. University authorities, reportedly, did not make enough efforts to sustain the GSCASH. Students protested to highlight that the GSCASH had been lying defunct for some time, without any elected student representative. The accused rapists did not expect the victim to take recourse to the law. Instead, they thought they could ‘handle the situation’ and ‘talk it out’ with the girl. The assumption that they would be able to get away with it seems to underlie their statements; perhaps they felt more confident as the girl had been drinking and gone to the Men’s Hostel, therefore not fitting the idea of an ‘innocent’ victim. Notions of women’s complicity in cases where victims did not conform to ‘norms’ of dress and behaviour, unfortunately, also prevail on campus. For these reasons, some students fear that universities, under the guise of a ‘taskforce’ for gender sensitisation, want to prevent cases from becoming public by internally dealing with the issue, potentially letting rapists get away with just a suspension.

Following the incident and protests, stricter rules and curfew hours were enforced at EFLU, mostly for female students, supposedly to protect them. Students were infuriated and with the support of student bodies and various committees, they began to protest. They demanded that a defunct GSCASH be reactivated with elected representatives from all sections of the campus community. For the students, gender segregation and moral policing were not the right solution to gender violence. Indeed, by forcibly keeping men and women apart and reinforcing the idea that men are constantly trying to rape vulnerable women, the authorities are strengthening a culture of segregation rather than one of sensitisation.

These incidents led to protests on campuses across the country, where students were dissatisfied – enraged even – about the fact many universities still fall short when it comes to basic requirements for gender sensitisation and complaints procedures. The University Grants Commission (UGC) guidelines urges universities to establish GSCASH on campuses to take necessary action to prevent any form of violence within university premises:

The students are entitled to protection from sexual harassment by complaining to the Gender Sensitization Committees against Sexual Harassment. It is mandatory for each college/university to constitute and publicize this committee as per the Guidelines and norms laid down by the Hon’ble Supreme Court.

In response to the brutal Delhi assault and gang rape of a medical intern in a bus in 2012, the UGC created a task force which drafted the Saksham report to “review the measures for ensuring safety and security of women in campuses and programmes for gender sensitization”. The report states:

A major finding and deep concern for the Task Force has been that the weakest aspect of our institutions of higher education is their lack of gender sensitivity. This is evident from the mode in which the questionnaires were answered as well as the Open Forums. This means that there is a widespread culture of not speaking out on issues, one which affects the more socially and institutionally vulnerable students the most.

The report recommends that the focus should be on confidentiality and fair enquiries, not coercion, and that gender sensitisation should be required in all colleges and universities, for students as well as faculty, teaching, administrative and other staff.  

Universities have urged that GSCASH be established everywhere in line with the UGC recommendations. The GSCASH is to be an autonomous body comprised of elected representative members from each section of the university community – students, teachers, and non-teaching staff. The function of the committee is not just to take down complaints of gender violence and set up enquiry probes; one of the primary functions of the GSCASH is to bring about gender sensitisation within the university space.

JNU was one of the first universities to implement GSCASH in compliance with UGC directions. JNU has had a history of gender violence on the campus, and students and teachers have been seen turning to GSCASH to take appropriate action. At JNU, students and the university authorities, across party lines, are now proclaiming ‘zero tolerance’ with regards to sexual harassment. On the JU campus, posters for upcoming students’ elections mention the need for active GSCASH at the university. EFLU and other universities, such as Aligarh Muslim University, followed JNU and also implemented GSCASH. However, as reactions to the recent incidents at Jadavpur University and EFLU show, students, teachers and the university authorities do not always understand the importance of GSCASH as opposed to merely an internal complaints committee.

What the recent cases reveal is that sensitisation without segregation is needed more than ever. Women and men must be provided greater access to spaces within the university where they can meet and socialise as equals. This might be one of the early steps towards building a more egalitarian campus. A central university like EFLU has students from different parts of the country and from different backgrounds. There is no need to create more dividing lines than there already are. The university has the power to influence students and define the way they think and understand the world, so why not teach them a sensitive way of interacting with other genders?

Sensitisation has to be a universal process – at home, in school, college, university as well as at workplaces. It may seem ‘convenient’ or ‘easier’ to curb the freedom of women, emphasising that such restrictions are for their own good, but this is no long-term solution to the problem of sexual harassment and violence. University campuses are among the few spaces where there can be, and often is, some semblance of gender equality. As alumni and ‘other concerned individuals’ wrote in a public statement following the rape case at EFLU:

While no academic space is free from gender discrimination and/or violence, erstwhile CIEFL and the formative years of EFLU were known for the relatively free ways in which men and women could access common space, move about the campus in relative safety. 

At a time when such freedoms seem increasingly restricted, students are rightly protesting for better gender sensitisation through GSCASH, amongst other initiatives, in order to feel safe and move freely around campus.

~ Asmita Das is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Film Studies, Jadavpur University, Kolkata.

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Economic and Political Weekly: Table of Contents

Indian Urbanism and the Terrain of the Law

Vol - L No. 36, September 05, 2015 | Janaki Nair 

• Special Articles

In the controversies around, and legal and political challenges to, the Bangalore-Mysore Infrastructure Corridor being constructed by Nandi Infrastructure Corridor Enterprises, one can see signs of a new historical stage and urban form. Court judgments between 1997 and 2006 relating to land acquisition for infrastructure projects such as NICE tell us about the new urban form, which the courts feel obliged to bring into being, displaying a proselytising zeal in promoting corridor urbanism. The corridor project has seized hold of the planning, bureaucratic, and judicial imagination in ways that signal a consensus about the imperatives of rapid capitalist growth, uncontaminated by any early postcolonial notions of developmentalist growth.

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National Health Policy 2015

Mapping the Gaps

Vol - L No. 36, September 05, 2015 | Forum for Medical Ethics Society 

• Commentary

The draft National Health Policy 2015 is an improvement over its predecessors--the policies of 1984 and 2002. However, it also reveals several gaps, inconsistencies and blind spots which tend to dilute otherwise constructive proposals. The purpose of this article is to open up the draft to further public debate and comment.

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Editorials 'Problem Animals' Are Not the Real Problem The government proposal on culling treats only the symptom; the problem is of a declining animal habitat. Read more	Reports From the States / Web Exclusives Connecting Wildlife Corridors Looking Beyond Ranthambhore Jimmy Borah, Sunny Shah, Joseph Vattakaven, Sitaram Taigor,Ravi Singh Tigers from Ranthambhore National Park move through degraded and fragmented forest patches and agricultural fields to reach Kuno Palpur Wildlife Sanctuary and Madhav National Park—two of the most important corridors in the Western India... Read more
Notes Curricular Images of Scientists Textbooks and Popularity of Science Gurjeet Kaur Preconceived notions of scientists lead students to picture them as "different" kinds of people and view science itself as an "exclusive" practice. These images, and the students' ability or inability to identify with them... Read more	Commentary D A Low (1927-2015) A Tribute Gyanesh Kudaisya Donald Anthony Low, who passed away in February 2015, could write with ease about African history as he could about South Asia. A distinguished historian, teacher and an excellent administrator, Low was a mentor to some of the finest historians... Read more
Margin Speak Greatest Threat to Internal Security Anand Teltumbde The state is not worried about the guns of the Naxalites. It is scared about the dissent they foment. Read more	Commentary The Ufa Fiasco India Could Surely Do Better S D Muni There have been two conflicting strategies within Pakistan relating to its India policy--the dominant hawkish one held by the military and a more conciliatory one often pushed by its civilian governments. The Ufa Joint Statement was an example of... Read more
Book Reviews Working of the Supreme Court of India Vikram Raghavan The Shifting Scales of Justice: The Supreme Court in Neo-liberal India edited by Mayur Suresh and Siddharth Narrain; Orient BlackSwan, Hyderabad 2014; pp xxvi + 199, Rs 650. Read more	Editorials Back to the 'Fail–Pass' System? The call to rescind the no-detention and continuous evaluation policies in schools is misguided . Read more
Editorials Aurangzeb's Last Battle Our sense of history is stuck in the past; indeed, it is steadily regressing to the era of myths . Read more	Commentary Yuan Devaluation and Its Impact Biswajit Dhar The warning signals have been there for some time--China's merchandise trade has been contracting and its economy has been slowing. Now the yuan has been devalued by 1.9%. What will be the outcome, especially for India? Read more
Commentary Black Money Tax Compliance Scheme Grey Patches Remain Sudipto Banerjee There are a number of unclear areas in the Black Money (Undisclosed Foreign Income and Assets) and Imposition of Tax Act, 2015 and the tax compliance scheme. These are bound to pose practical challenges and be prone to conflicting interpretations... Read more	Commentary User Fees and Political and Regulatory Risks in Indian Public–Private Partnerships Kumar V Pratap Good quality infrastructure services have to be paid for, either by the users as user charges or by the government through explicit subsidies. The recent dismantling of toll booths in the country is increasing the political and regulatory risks... Read more
Book Reviews Intimate Connections Geetika Bapna Conjugality Unbound: Sexual Economies, State Regulation and the Marital Form in India edited by Srimati Basu and Lucinda Ramberg, New Delhi: Women Unlimited, 2015; pp viii+283, Rs 575 (hardback). Read more	Perspectives Value, Visibility and the Demand for Justice Anupama Rao This article begins with issues of mourning and commemoration that arose in the context of the killings in the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. It then relates them with questions regarding the worth and... Read more
Special Articles Non-Food Expenditures and Consumption Inequality in India Amit Basole, Deepankar Basu This paper contributes to the ongoing debate about economic inequality in India during the post-reform period. It analyses consumption inequality through the hitherto neglected lens of non-food expenditure. Using household level consumption... Read more	Special Articles Opportunities and Challenges of Regulatory Convergence in India's Financial Sector The Case of the SEBI–FMC Merger Nilanjan Ghosh, Kushankur Dey Various opportunities accompany the merger of the Securities Exchange Board of India with the Forward Markets Commission, as announced in the 2015-16 union budget. At the same time, important regulatory and developmental challenges have to be... Read more
Discussion Human Resource Development in Health Services Bhushan Patwardhan, Shailesh Deshpande, Nilangi Sardeshpande, Swapnil Gadhve, Girish Tillu This response to Javid Chowdhury ("National Health Policy 2015: A Narrow Focus Needed," EPW, 28 February 2015) and Anant Phadke ("Slippery Slope for Public Health Services," EPW, 28 February 2015) argues that a course designed... Read more	Reports From the States / Web Exclusives What Vadodara’s Slum Displacement Reveals Case of Kalyannagar and Kamatipura Lancy Lobo The demolition and displacement of two major slums in Vadodara has revealed that little, if any, of the pervasive communal politics has changed in Gujarat. This coupled with anti-poor policies of the state have ensured that poor Muslims are...

Grade the deemed varsities, says HC to NAAC

In a most awaited move, the Supreme Court has asked the National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC) to assess and grade the 41 deemed universities, which were sought to be de-recognised (on the basis of the Tandon Committee report), based on the 2012 Regulations of NAAC, without considering the 2010 UGC Regulations.

A bench of Justices Dipak Misra and Prafulla C. Pant gave this direction after senior counsel Rajeev Dhavan, appearing for a few DUs, submitted that the DUs concerned had not sent their self-appraisal report  of compliance with the 2010 UGC Regulations, which had been quashed by two high courts. He said since the appeal is pending in the apex court, assessment should not be done on UGC regulations.

The bench in its order took note of the submissions made on behalf of the government and consulting all the stake-holders, — the All-India Council for Technical Education, UGC, National Assessment and Accreditation Council and National Board of Accreditation — for evolving new guidelines and framing statutory rules in three months.

Prof. R. Sethuraman, vice-chancellor of SASTRA University, appreciated the move and said: “The Supreme Court has rightly nailed the coffin by ignoring the Tandon Committee report and ordering NAAC to conduct inspection and submit its report.”

“The government of India ignored the statutorily-empowered NAAC and relied on the arbitrary grades of the Tandon Committee which also upgraded from B to A deemed universities with unauthorised off-campus. The 9th and 10th Five-Year Plans and the UGC’s gazette notification dated January 19, 2013 had clearly delegated powers of conducting inspection and awarding grades by NAAC. The action of constituting the Tandon Committee and its report is superfluous, and the direction of the Supreme Court asking NAAC to conduct accreditation is in the larger interest of higher education,” said Sethuraman.

The bench directed the NAAC to complete the gradation/accreditation in eight weeks and said the DUs concerned should send the self-appraisal reports in 10 days and directed the matter to be listed for further hearing on November 19.

Old problems mar a new solution

District Mineral Foundations were set up to protect the interests of Adivasi communities who have borne the costs of mining. But they are flawed in their current form

Through 2011-13, dogged investigators from the Justice M. B. Shah Commission on illegal mining toured the rust-red villages, forests and rivers of northern Odisha, and trawled through reams of official records including from the environment, minerals, railways, and revenue departments. They met with underpaid mineworkers and affected communities. They questioned mining companies, who were mostly represented by well-heeled lawyers, including Pinaki Mishra, the State’s richest Member of Parliament, and representative of the Biju Janata Dal, the party ruling Odisha since 2000.

The stark conclusion of the commission’s 1,619-page report confirmed what Odisha, in particular its Adivasi citizens, has long known: “...there is no rule of law, but the law is what the mighty mining companies decide, with the connivance of the concerned department.”

Faced with the scrutiny of Justice Shah’s team, the State government’s belated admission that there were many illegal miners in Odisha took the form of 146 recovery notices. Issued in March 2013 to miners for illegally extracted ore, the notices added up to a whopping Rs. 59,203 crore, equalling a quarter of the State’s annual GDP. This is a sum large enough to pay Rs. 16 lakh to every single Adivasi family in Keonjhar and Sundergarh, the two districts hit by the scam.

Lessons to be learnt

Two years on, not a single rupee of this money has been recovered. The notices, and the larger issues of lawless mining, ecological damage and abuses borne by local communities remain buried under litigation and neglect.

The commission’s findings demonstrated that, left to themselves, the State-miners combine cannot be trusted to uphold public interest, and that decision-making in mining projects must yield to greater public scrutiny, in particular of local communities. But ongoing policy changes suggest that few lessons have been learnt.

Through an August 18 notification, Odisha has become the first State in the country to issue rules for the District Mineral Foundation (DMF) — an institution created by a March 2015 amendment through which the Narendra Modi government brought far-reaching changes to India’s mining regulations. The amendments primarily aimed at giving the State the power to auction vast tracts of mineral-rich forests and farmlands to mining corporations, and were not preceded by any inter-ministerial consultation with other relevant departments, such as the Ministry of Tribal Affairs (MTA).

DMFs are defined in the amendment as bodies that will work ‘for the interest and benefit of persons and areas affected by mining-related operations’. They are the State’s belated response to clinching evidence that citizens of India’s ore-rich areas, primarily Adivasi communities, endure degraded livelihoods and bear the social, environmental and health costs of mining, but get few benefits. In their current form, the DMFs are also flawed.

Five months after the amendment, there is no clarity on what percentage of revenues miners must contribute to the DMF. A 2011 bill drafted by the United Progressive Alliance government had mandated that mining companies pay to the DMF an amount equivalent to the royalty (currently fixed at 15 per cent of the value for a mineral like iron ore). The National Democratic Alliance government diluted this provision. The amended law now states that new lease-holders will contribute an amount “not exceeding a third of the royalty” to the DMF; existing lease holders will contribute an amount “not exceeding the royalty”. Effectively, the law specifies ceilings, but no floors.

Ore-rich States such as Karnataka and Odisha have since argued that new lease holders, to be decided through auctions, should contribute an amount equalling one-third of the royalty; existing leaseholders’ contributions should equal the royalty, given the “super profits” they earned through a decade-long mining boom. (To give an indication of their earnings, the Shah Commission had calculated that if the value of ore mined in just a single year, e.g. 2009, had accrued to locals, it would amount to a cash benefit of Rs. 4.5 lakh for every single family in Keonjhar and Sundergarh districts.) However officials at the Union Ministry of Mines have told the States these terms are unlikely.

Where the Centre draws the lines will determine whether a DMF in Keonjhar annually gets, say, Rs. 600 crore (going by a Centre for Science and Environment estimate, built on 2012-13 iron ore production figures). Or, simply, Rs. 200 crore. While mining associations lobby the Centre on keeping their contributions to the DMF to a minimum, there is no similar platform for other stakeholders outside government to voice their concerns. In fact, there is absolutely no transparency or disclosure from the Centre on how it is carrying out the decision-making process on this crucial issue.

Similarly, the Odisha government’s August 18 DMF notification was neither preceded by any public consultation exercise, especially in ore-rich districts, nor was a draft version of the rules issued to incorporate public feedback and review. Unsurprisingly, this opaque process has resulted in a DMF that centralises powers in the bureaucracy, and is cast as an executor of official-driven programmes. For example, the District Collector features on the DMF’s Board of Trustees, as well as its Executive Committee. This creates conflict of interest between the overseeing and implementing functions.

Worse, government officials dominate the DMF’s Board of Trustees, and constitute the entirety of its Executive Committee. Officials have the powers to prepare plans and budgets, sanction funds, award contracts, and if they deem appropriate, even use DMF funds for projects at the block and district level, thus bypassing remote Adivasi villages in the forests and mountains witnessing mining.

It is alarming how, despite local communities being the hardest hit by mining projects, the institutional framework created by these rules entirely sidelines public participation and local knowledge as elements crucial to building an effective DMF. The only allowance the rules make is the provision of gram sabha approval for decisions of the DMF in scheduled areas. However, officials have prepared the ground for reducing this to a token by not detailing what the approval process will entail.

In this overly centralised structure, communities can neither plan nor authorise tasks, which they believe the DMF should undertake. They cannot even conduct social audits of projects carried out in their name — in fact, the only audit the notification specifies is an internal one.

Ironically, the Union Ministry of Mines’ own 2011 document on ‘Sustainable Mining’ conceptualised the DMFs as bodies with project-affected, community and civil society representation, and a more expansive public role. This included building the capacities of Adivasi co-operatives in line with the Samata judgement on mining in scheduled areas, providing affected communities with monitoring powers on existing mines, enabling informed participation in consent processes, and holding periodic district-level consultations on the impacts of mining, with the involvement of key policymakers like the MTA and the Ministry of Environment and Forests.

As the Shah Commission’s reports outlined, mineral-rich areas are afflicted by a severe asymmetry of power between local communities and the State-miner combine. Ongoing policies are widening this inequity, and reinforcing the harmful approach that Adivasi lands are, first and foremost, a site for resource extraction.

(Chitrangada Choudhury is an Odisha-based multimedia journalist and researcher, and a Fellow with the Open Society Institute. Email: suarukh@gmail.com)

National web portal for apprenticeship training launched

• IANS, New Delhi
| 
• Updated: Sep 10, 2015 17:33 IST
• Human resource development minister Smriti Irani on Thursday launched the national web portal for promotion of a national apprenticeship scheme. The scheme, which provides opportunities for practical training, is for graduates, diploma holders and 10+2 pass vocational certificate holders.
  "The portal will now ensure seamless connectivity with all stakeholders, including students, establishments and technical institutions across the country for transparent administration through e-governance," Irani said in a statement.
  The portal, through the mechanism of internal complaints committee, would also offer security for women at workplace and ensure grievance redressal for the apprentice, she said. It will also be a multilingual platform which currently engages with the user in Marathi, Bengali, Tamil and Hindi.
  Irani also asked the All India Council for Technical Education and National Skill Development Corporation to come together to expand the outreach and exposure especially for class 11 and 12 students. A logo and a slogan "Sashakt Yuva, Samarth Bharat" was also released for the portal.
  The ministry implements the apprenticeship training scheme for one year through board of apprenticeship training and board of practical training at Mumbai, Chennai, Kanpur and Kolkata.

Action and Inaction
The idea of inaction arises on account of a misunderstanding of the nature of action. It highlights the frivolity of the human mind in seeking to see action through activity , and inaction through inactivity .The human can never be inactive. Every cell in the body is active -in the mind, heart, limbs, everywhere. Inaction is impossible. To understand action and inaction, and the presence of one in the other, is also one of the greatest challenges of leadership. How well a leader is able to maintain silence, both in thought and action based on his foresight to predict the futility of such actions is a reflection of good leadership.

When such a leader understands his `Self ', and seeks comfort through the knowledge of knowing his `inactions', then such a leader can gain comfort in this inaction. On the other hand, the pointlessness of several tasks performed daily , is an illustration of inaction in action. A leadership dilemma involves the choice between several activities which seem important and urgent, versus those which are significant and vital. The thin line distinguishing the two often makes for the case of inaction in action when resultant outcomes seem insignificant or immaterial in the larger scheme of things. The ability to choose those actions which truly indicate the desire to perform and achieve results requires a deep connection with the `Self ' and the ability to understand `inaction' as well.