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Tuesday, May 17, 2016

Treat All Views With Equanimity And Respect
Anekant Kumar Jain


The twenty-fourth Jain tirthankara, Mahavira, presented the theory of `anekant' that encourages interpersonal and communal harmony by promoting tolerance in the community . The same principle can be extended to intellectual, social, religious and other spheres. Anekant ensures peaceful co-existence to all peoples, however diverse their faith or background.Today , everyone across the world is troubled by the growing intolerance between people and even countries.India has a long tradition of tolerance.Mahavira's philosophy of `anekantvada' refers to the importance of giving room for multiple viewpoints. In its most basic form, anekant means that there are multiple perceptions of truth, and that no single point of view can be considered absolutely right. This approach is quite different from dogmatic religions that insist: `My way or the high way .' At the core of anekantvada is the belief that the universe and everything in it, that is the objects of our perception, are infinite in their qualities. Whereas human perception is finite, and what's more, each human's perceptions are different based on the filter through which they see the world.
No two people are identical, and naturally it follows that there are as many different perceptions of the world as there are people! Thus, it is impossible for one individual to completely grasp all aspects and manifestations of the universe and truth. Statements like, `Only my religionsect is right and others are totally wrong,' are creating wars.`Other may be right' typeof-thinking can increase the tolerance quotient.
Anekant means belief in peaceful co-existence in both practical and philosophical ways. When you say `you or me' instead of `you and me' the trouble starts.The sanctity of religion has been destroyed by this view. “Only those have the right to survive who follow my religion, all the rest should be extirpated.“
The dictionary meaning of `tolerance' exposes the negative aspect of acceptance in a dominant manner. If tolerance is taken to mean `ability or capacity to tolerate', it will point to toleration out of compulsion, out of helplessness or out of dire need of survival. It may even indicate the attitude of treating the other person with condemnation or the attitude of a superiority complex and treating the other as inferior, as for example powerful nations tolerating weak, underdeveloped countries.
Hence, true anekantvada is that which treats all other views, including itself, with equanimity . By doing so, the concept of anekantvada demands surrender of undue pride in one's own existence and supremacy and developing humility and respect towards other perspectives. In situations of communal disturbances and religious tensions, approaching the problem in a spirit of anekantvada can help to solve these battles.
All religions are different pathways to the same goal, and no religion is superior or inferior to another religion. All religious faiths are equally respectable.The theory can be applied to many spheres of life where there are battles arising out of misunderstanding. And it can be well understood that it is the theory advocating equanimity among and respect towards all possible alternatives, rather than the ability to `tolerate'.
Similarly in a democratic form of government, the doctrine of anekant is very important for both the ruling and opposition parties to accept the existence of each other as real and learn to live with each other in a logical and peaceful manner.
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Monday, May 16, 2016

Economic and Political Weekly: Table of Contents

Vol. 51, Issue No. 20, 14 May, 2016

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A blow against free speech

The Supreme Court has always had an ambivalent relationship with the freedom of speech and expression, treating free speech more as anannoyance than a right. Its defamation law judgment continues that long, unfortunate history.

At the dawn of the 17th century, Englishmen were in the habit of challenging each other to violent duels in order to avenge personal insults. Public disorder was frequent and the authorities decided to step in. To obviate the need for duels, they began to prosecute defamation as a criminal offence. So was born the notorious “criminal libel”. Truth was no defence since a true defamatory statement was as likely to lead to a breach of peace as a false one. There was even a saying, “the greater the truth, the greater the libel.” Two hundred and fifty years later, in 1860, the British imported their idea of criminal libel into the newly-minted Indian Penal Code (IPC). Section 499 of the IPC criminalised intentionally defamatory statements. True statements were not exempted, unless they also happened to be made for the “public good”.
World has moved on
Gautam Bhatia
So much for history. In the 400 years after the origin of criminal defamation in England, and in the 150 years after the drafting of the IPC, the world has moved on. There are no more duels. In 2009, the United Kingdom abolished criminal defamation altogether. More recently, the Constitutional Court of Zimbabwe struck it down as an unconstitutional restriction upon the freedom of speech. The apex courts of the United States, Canada and South Africa have transformed criminal defamation out of all recognition, adding defences that make it far more protective of the freedom of speech and expression. There has been a growing recognition all over the world that criminal defamation is a powerful tool in the hands of politicians and corporations to stifle and suffocate inconvenient speech.
On Friday, however, none of this seemed to matter to the Indian Supreme Court. Dismissing a petition filed by Subramaniam Swamy challenging the constitutionality of Section 499 of the IPC (Dr. Swamy was later joined by a whole host of figures across the political spectrum, including Rahul Gandhi and Arvind Kejriwal), the court kept the 1860 provision, with its 17th century roots, entirely intact. In order to keep such an onerous offence on the statute books, the court had to construct novel arguments which will have serious and unfortunate implications for the freedom of speech and expression in the coming years.
Using reputation as right

First, it held that the right to “reputation” was protected under Article 21 of the Constitution which guarantees “life and personal liberty”. Now, Article 21 only protects the individual’s life and liberty against interference by the state. Notwithstanding this minor textual hurdle, the Supreme Court declared that the right to free speech under Article 19(1)(a) had to be “balanced” against the right to “reputation” under Article 21. The court never explained how this balancing exercise was to be carried out, but simply asserted that since reputation could not be “crucified” at the altar of free speech, criminal defamation was constitutional.
The two moves that the court made — the first, to elevate “reputation” to the level of a fundamental right, and second, to have it prevail over free speech — have no basis in either the text or the structure of the Constitution. They are also dangerous moves. Over the last 30 years, along with its PIL jurisdiction, the court has radically expanded the scope of the right to “life and personal liberty” under Article 21. Article 21 has been held to include the right to sleep, and the right to a pollution-free environment, among other things. For the most part, the court has used this expanded definition to force the state to undertake various “social justice” and welfare measures for the benefit of citizens. But on Friday, the court did something else. Instead of using Article 21 as a shield to protect the individual against State persecution or indifference, it used it as a sword to cut down the fundamental right to freedom of speech and expression. There have been hints of this before in the court’s jurisprudence, but on Friday, this new doctrine of “death by Article 21” emerged as a serious threat to the future of constitutional rights. Article 21 has now become so vast, that if its use as a sword becomes a regular feature, then it will likely soon swallow up the rest of the fundamental rights chapter.
Invoking ‘constitutional fraternity’

The court’s second argument was to invoke something that it called “constitutional fraternity”. It held that criminal defamation law protected the feeling of fraternity — or solidarity — between members of a society. While this may sound fair enough, there is a slight problem. “Constitutional fraternity” is not a part of Article 19(2) of the Constitution, which specifically limits the circumstances under which the state can restrict speech to eight enumerated categories. It is also nowhere in the fundamental rights chapter of the Constitution, so the question of “balancing” free speech against constitutional fraternity does not arise. The word “fraternity” is mentioned in the Constitution’s preamble, as an aspirational goal for the newly independent Indian Republic, alongside “liberty” and “equality” — the three great slogans that originated with the French Revolution. And it was always meant to be that — an abstract concept and a rallying cry, signifying a dream and a utopia. It was never meant to become a tool to broaden the scope of restrictions upon fundamental rights.
Apart from its broad, almost undefinable nature, there is something particularly unfortunate about using “fraternity” to cut down civil rights. The existence of “fraternity” alongside liberty and equality is due to the realisation that in a deeply unequal society, guaranteeing civil rights (“liberty”) and equality before law are not enough. “Fraternity” signifies a common humanity, an end to the exploitation of human beings by other human beings. As B.R. Ambedkar observed, in his last speech to the Constituent Assembly: “...Liberty cannot be divorced from equality, equality cannot be divorced from liberty. Nor can liberty and equality be divorced from fraternity. Without equality, liberty would produce the supremacy of the few over the many. Equality without liberty would kill individual initiative. Without fraternity, liberty would produce the supremacy of the few over the many. Without fraternity, liberty and equality could not become a natural course of things. It would require a constable to enforce them.”
Fraternity, then, was meant to complement civil rights, not to destroy them. The Constitution’s framers did not use this symbolic term for a court to come along 66 years later, and appropriate it for the purposes of subordinating individual rights to some mythic notion of community harmony, entirely submerging the individual within the society.
Silences and omissions

There are, therefore, serious problems with the court’s stated justifications for upholding the constitutionality of criminal defamation. Equally problematic are the silences, the arguments that the court failed to engage with. For instance, it made no mention of the fact that Section 499 does not allow for “honest mistake” as a defence. This omission is especially glaring because this very Supreme Court, 22 years ago, had found that the civil law of defamation, as it then stood, was unconstitutional and a disproportionate restriction upon free speech, since it did not allow for “honest mistake”. Last week’s judgment creates a bizarre legal situation where criminal liability for defamation is attracted at a lower threshold than civil liability! Equally disappointing is the court’s cursory, one-paragraph dismissal of the claim that criminal defamation creates a chilling effect upon speech. Such proclamations are easy to make from the high, secure, and insulated bench of the Supreme Court. It is journalists and newspapers, fighting hundreds of frivolous cases in court, who have to deal with the very real consequences.
The Indian Supreme Court has always had an ambivalent relationship with the freedom of speech and expression. From upholding the constitutionality of sedition, blasphemy and obscenity on the one hand, to Justice V.R. Krishna Iyer writing about how “books or bombs” might disturb public tranquillity, the court has treated free speech more as an annoyance to be swatted aside whenever “public interest” demands it, rather than the fundamental right at the foundation of our republican democracy. Its defamation law judgment continues that long, unfortunate history.
Gautam Bhatia is a Delhi-based lawyer.
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Health Protection Scheme: Still more work needed

It is critical that the HPS is finalised after considering possible distortions in medical insurance schemes and looking at models that have worked.

The Health Protection Scheme (HPS) that was announced in the Union Budget 2016 is more generous than the earlier scheme, the Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana (RSBY). Poor households now get an annual health cover of Rs.1 lakh; the limit under RSBY was Rs.30,000. In principle, the HPS benefits may be availed of in public and private health facilities, to help leverage the very large private health infrastructure that has spontaneously come up over the decades.
However, the HPS needs careful design, as otherwise, well-recognised market failures in medical insurance schemes would effectively ensure that each entitled household runs up the full limit of Rs.1 lakh per year on benefits, with scant improvement in well-being.
Meenakshi Datta Ghosh
The media has reported (April 26, 2016) how the National Institution for Transforming India (NITI) Aayog is beginning to look at design issues, and that all MBBS doctors in the rural areas, trained as family physicians, would be contracted by the government and paid in accordance with the number of patients who avail their primary health-care services. At secondary health-care levels, public and private facilities would be “incentivised” to provide “efficient” treatment, that is, being more efficient = having more compensation. At the tertiary stage, All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS)-like public hospitals and “low cost” private hospitals would be contracted.
There is a possibility that the proposals reportedly discussed at NITI Aayog could lead to a new inspector raj system, and may not be cost-effective. Why so? At each stage, each player (maybe not the Narayana Hrudayalayas) would seek to maximise its compensation by providing unnecessary treatment, thereby inflating costs. Curtailing this would require intensive and honest monitoring, which is very difficult. The more likely result is collusion between providers and inspectors to mutual benefit and at the cost of the public exchequer.
The NHS model

It is critical that the HPS is finalised after considering possible distortions in medical insurance schemes and looking at models that have worked. There are two main reasons why competitive markets — markets that minimise total costs, leading to the least prices (premiums) for users — do not form for health insurance. The first is the problem of “adverse selection”, or individuals who have better information about their personal health status, leading to the healthier persons opting out of insurance and the less healthy opting in. This will not arise in a group insurance scheme where all those who are eligible are mandatorily enrolled. The second is the problem of “moral hazard”, i.e. doctors have better information about a patient’s treatment needs than the patient, and also have a financial interest in providing excessive treatment.
These two considerations have been largely addressed in the U.K.’s National Health Service, which in 2015 was rated among the best health-care systems in the world in terms of ease of access, efficiency, and cost-to-patient. First, in this model, all persons, irrespective of their health or economic status, are enrolled in the NHS. (This takes care of “adverse selection”.) Second, health service providers, who have the competence to provide the entire range of primary, secondary, and tertiary health care in medical conditions covered by the NHS, and are willing to provide their services in terms of the NHS financial package, are accredited. This accreditation is subject to rigorous review and renewal after a specified period — often every year.The state attempts to ensure that all corners of a given territory are covered with accredited health-care providers. Third, the NHS notifies standard treatment protocols for the full range of health conditions covered by the programme, and works out the normative costs of each protocol (for example, in terms of the costs that would be incurred in an equivalent public facility). Fourth, it works out the statistical incidence of each covered health condition in each region (county), and combining the statistical incidence and normative costs for treatment of each condition, arrives at a per-capita health premium for each region, payable as subsidy by the state. Fifth, the NHS card holder is entitled to care and treatment for the full range of conditions covered. The NHS incentivises health-care providers to observe and provide a high quality of care at all times, as the beneficiary will happily migrate to another accredited provider (by enrolling in a fresh registry) in the event of dissatisfaction. Finally, accredited health-care providers must comply with treatment protocols and guidelines emanating from the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE).
This system guards against “moral hazard” since the health-care provider’s revenue is determined only with reference to the standard treatment protocol and the statistical incidence, and not actual manifestation in each family of covered health conditions. Excess tests/treatment are not paid by the NHS. The provider also focusses on preventive health measures, since this typically costs very little, would lower the probability of a given condition occurring in the voucher period, and where the provider is paid as per the value of the voucher irrespective of whether or not a covered condition actually manifests itself. The incentive to provide preventive health measures helps ensure that the burden of morbidity in a given region falls over time, leading to reduced aggregate costs of treatment.
The NHS model can fit different models of financing, i.e. fully public, part public, and fully private, and also for scaling co-payments (if part privately funded) as per the economic status of the beneficiary. The range of conditions covered, as well as standard treatment protocols and normative costs, can be changed over time.
There may be good models in other countries. Let us do our homework now rather than repent later.
Meenakshi Datta Ghosh is former Secretary, Government of India, and Principal Adviser (Health), Planning Commission. E-mail: mdattaghosh@gmail.com
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Tagore's Cosmic Love
M N KUNDU


An experience of the infinite Absolute is expressed in the Rig Veda thus, “Oh, the vastness!“ In Rabindranath Tagore's mystic vision, the vastness of the Omnipresent is manifested in a colourful and rhythmic feast of sight and symphony and the Creator appeared as his cosmic beloved. But His perpetual presence constituted a profound theme of divine romance, an earnest mysticism of intense joy and realisation above any intellectual pursuit or bookish philosophy .Tagore's divine romance is grounded in the reality of life but never in any sense in the negation of life. “No, I will never shut the doors of my senses. The delights of sight, hearing and touch will bear Thy delight,“ he wrote. He felt the embrace of freedom in innumerable bonds of delight and so he did not want deliverance through renunciation of joyful engagement with life.
This world-affirming pantheism of Tagore, however, does not make him oblivious to the domain of infinitude where there is neither day nor night, form or colour, not even a single word. This realisation of the dualism of the non-dual Being made him sing, “Thou art the sky and thou art the nest as well.“
Tagore's cosmic romance found a profound elevation in the firm assertion, “Thou hast taken me as Thy partner is all this wealth. In my heart is the endless play of Thy delight. In my life Thy will is ever taking shape.“ Is this not the height of mysticism, a mingling of poetry and spirituality?

Source: Economic, Times
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Save The Children
Kailash Satyarthi


PM Modi should launch child-centric drought relief measures with immediate effect
This year, the absolute dearth of rainfall has resulted in the longest spell of drought in over 100 years. Approximately 33.6 crore people have been affected in 254 districts. More horrifying is the figure of 16.3 crore children, who are being subjected to this calamity , making them even more vulnerable.I am completely shaken as i write this because news of the death of 2 young siblings in Adilabad district of Telangana just reached me. The children, aged 12 and 8 respectively , succumbed to thirst and breathed their last while waiting, desperately , for their mother to return with some water.
They were on their way to a wedding in a nearby village and on their failure to arrive at the destination; their relatives began a search operation for them. The mother was found unconscious in the forest, with an empty water bottle by her side.
Saubhagya, a young girl of 9 was recently given up as a devdasi by her mother and maternal uncle, as they could not provide her with drinking water at home. This tradition of dedicating girls to Yellamma, the Goddess associated closely with devdasis is unfortunately on a rise in Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Maharashtra and states worst affected by the drought.
Despite the extent of the problem, many of the affected states have not declared themselves as hit by drought. This has not only prevented appropriate government funds from being directed to such areas, especially for the care and protection of children, but also hindered other disaster management response mechanisms to be initiated for emergency relief.
The present situation has pushed entire villages into extreme poverty and vulnerability due to the failure of crops and industry . In Marathwada district of Maharashtra, more than 1,430 farmers have committed suicide since January last year, leaving behind over 3,500 children to fend for themselves and their mothers. This tale of sadness and sorrow has grown beyond proportion and needs to be heeded to, urgently .
I have written a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi drawing his attention to the plight of our children and sharing with him my concerns.Forty per cent of India's children have been severely affected by the drought, which is perhaps the worst ever.
Our children face heavy risks in terms of early childhood care and development. Better health contributes not only to improved childhood but also the social well-being of the child in the future and the nation. Children play a crucial role in the development of any country's human capital, and more importantly so in the Indian context since 41% of our population comprises under-18s.
Their health and protection, thus, cannot be neglected, on human or economic grounds. However, unfortunately , the situation is worsening by the day , and the lack of preparedness and political apathy are only adding to the aftermath.
According to a survey conducted by a civil society organisation in the Bundelkhand region, 24% households admitted to willingly pushing their children into labour between March and November 2015. Additionally , 22% of the households disclosed that the drought has forced them to pull their children out of school.
Media reports suggest that child marriage has also increased rampantly in these drought affected states. With our intervention, recently a 14-year-old girl was saved from being married off in Hastur Tanda village of Maharashtra.In fact, many girls between the age group of 3 and 15 years in the village were being forcefully married off this season. Similarly, in district Yadgir, Karnataka 10 child marriages were prevented of late.
In answer to a question raised in the Parliament in March 2016, ministry of home affairs quoted the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) data of statewise missing children which suggests that more than half of these children in India come from these 10 drought-hit states. Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh, the two most drought-affected states comprise one-fourth of the country-wide missing figure. The drought is in its fourth year now and these numbers are only going to increase in the coming months.
It is, therefore, a must that we declare this drought a national emergency with immediate effect. In addition, it is imperative that the government takes speedy measures to assess and analyse the effects of drought on children and ensure that no child in the affected areas is forced into child labour, bonded labour, child marriage, or is trafficked, or compelled to leave school.
It is essential that our parliamentarians come together for a day of discussions, focussed exclusively on the need to protect and prioritise our children. It is not too much to ask.
The National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) needs to mandate the state bodies to formulate special agencies with an explicit framework to monitor and assess the situation of children in the affected states.
The Cabinet needs to deliberate on the prevention of further exploitation of children and initiate child-centric drought relief measures with immediate effect.There are large amounts of unspent CSR money alongside roughly Rs 3,600 crore with PSUs. This money should be utilised to plan and execute relief operations.
I understand the prime minister, who is also ex-officio chairperson of the National Disaster Management Authority , will be swift to act and prioritise children in all the relief and rehabilitation work.He has all our support.
We cannot afford to neglect our children. They cannot be the future we want, if they do not survive the present.
The writer won the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize for his work on child rights

source: Times of India, 16-05-2016
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The great Indian IIT dream: Why parents want children to be engineers

Kalu Sarai is not Kota. Or so people would like you to believe. This New Delhi neighbourhood has some obvious differences with the Rajasthan town that made its reputation as the country’s coaching hub for IIT and has recently been in news for a spate of student suicides.
For one, even though Kalu Sarai attracts IIT aspirants from the city and indeed from all over the country, it is just one neighbourhood in the sprawling national capital. Unlike Kota, where even auto drivers mark you as an IIT hopeful, or the parent of one, as soon as you alight at the station, in Delhi, cabbies don’t make that obvious connect the minute you give a Kalu Sarai address. Institutes here also claim that they ensure that students don’t feel unduly stressed about the competition that lies ahead.
A beginning is made
When the first India Institute of Technology (IIT) was set up in Kharagpur, West Bengal, in 1950, the aim was to create an institution for higher technical learning to boost post-war industrial development in India. Over the years as the number of IITs went up, the focus seems to have shifted to creating good employment opportunities for its students. It is so at least in the minds of the country’s vast middle class populace. “For years engineering, medical and the administrative services have been the professions of choice for the middle class,” explains sociologist Dipankar Gupta. “Engineering is the most preferred since there are more colleges offering engineering. Other professions have come up in recent years, but one often needs to be well connected to get those jobs. For most people, the chances of getting a job with an engineering degree are far better than with a simple bachelor of science or arts degree.”
Once that decision has been taken, the IIT is the next obvious choice. “On an average, an IIT degree helps one start at a 50% higher salary than a degree from a less pedigreed engineering college,” says Chiranjit Banerjee, managing director of People Plus, a Bangalore-based recruiting agency. Every year, placement season sees some IITian hit newspaper headlines by bagging that dream Google or Microsoft job with a salary varying between Rs 1.5 to Rs 2 crore, thus inspiring a fresh batch of aspirants to make an IIT degree the mission of their young lives.
“The number of students appearing for the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) for engineering has increased from 12 lakh to 14 lakh in the past five years. The IITs have a total of only 10,000 seats” says  R Subramanyam, additional secretary (technical education), ministry of human resource development.
Living on hope
Thus are born hubs like Kota, or Kalu Sarai in Delhi, that sell the hope of realising the big Indian IIT dream . Other cities too have their trusted institutes. “There are about 25 coaching centres for engineering in Kalu Sarai. The demand for tuition ensures that about two-three new centres open up every year,” says the manager of an institute.
To enter the area is like entering into an institute campus. FIITJEE, Bansal, TIME, Guidance, Narayana – the row of institutes is seemingly never ending. Employees of each institute hang around the lane, trying to solicit new students. Overhead fliers carry photographs of JEE toppers and the names of institutes that have trained them. Book shops too sport advertisements of the latest JEE result or books that can help crack the test. Other fliers inform of rooms available for rent for students. Shops selling fruit juice, tea or momos are thronged with students taking a quick break on their way in or out of classes. The conversation is all about engineering. Just to have made it so far is like half the battle won. The failure of his first attempt at getting a good enough ranking at JEE pushed Rishah Chauhan to a Kalu Sarai coaching centre. “I have got admission to an engineering college, but I want to try again for IIT,” he says.
It is this hope that made Sanjay Kumar Sharma, a shopkeeper in Bihar’s Motihari town, send his two sons to study at a coaching institute in Kalu Sarai as soon as they appeared for their class 10 board examinations. “When I was young there was no one to motivate me. But when I saw the children of many of my family members studying engineering, I encouraged my sons to do the same,” says Sharma, who paid Rs 1,68,000 to get his elder son admitted last year for a two-year coaching programme. “The younger one, Sarvajit, got a scholarship and so I had to pay only Rs 58,000 for him this year,” says the proud father, who pays an additional Rs 20,000 as hostel fees for both his sons. He is willing to sell off the family-owned land in Bihar or take a loan to fund the boys’ education once they get into engineering college.

KEY FIGURES

  • 14 lakh
  • number of aspirants for JEE, which has gone up from 12 lakhs in the last five years

  • 10,000
  • Total number of IIT seats.

  • 2.9 cr
  • Number of jobs in the organised sector in India (as of March 2011).

  • Source: Ministry of Human Resource Development and Ministry of Labour and Employment
But sitting in his coaching centre classroom, 16-year-old Sarvajit is already bored of the subject. “I wanted to be in the Army. If I tell my father that I’m not enjoying this, I think he will let me quit. But I don’t have the heart to tell him,” he says.
Classes are held for approximately six hours a day, during day time for those who have completed school and during afternoons and evenings for school-going aspirants. But most out-station aspirants, like Sarvajit and his brother, prefer to enrol at some school in their hometown in the distance education mode and keep the focus on the IIT preparation. “School fees in Delhi are beyond my means,” adds their father.
Students are alloted classes on the basis on grades and regular tests are done to upgrade or downgrade the students. Sixteen-year-old Rishabh has just started a two-year coaching programme after appearing for his class X board examinations this year. His smile is wistful when asked if he misses playing or hanging out with friends, watching movies or just sleeping during the holidays, but is quick to add that it is worth it. The IIT dream is his own, he insists. While his mother, Nidhi, says they never put any pressure on him, she admits that she worries about pressure from friends and extended family. “They are always saying that Rishabh is brilliant and is sure to get into IIT. That is a kind of pressure,” she says.
Pressure to perform
Often the pressure to perform is linked to the awareness of the financial burden parents must bear for their education. Like Sharman Joshi’s character in the film 3 Idiots, based on Chetan Bhagat’s novel Five Point Someone, whose every visit home is a reminder that his unmarried sister, ailing father and struggling mother need him to get his degree and a job.
It’s an awareness that also haunts 21-year-old Massouwir, who is preparing for the JEE for the second time. “My father is a mason. He has already paid Rs 65,000 tuition fees for a year of coaching. He does ask me what guarantee is there that I will be able to clear the test,” says Massouwir, sitting in a small dingy room in Kalu Sarai that he shares with another student. Though his family lives in Ghaziabad, he prefers to stay as a paying guest here, paying Rs 3,500 a month and an additional Rs 2,500 for his meals. “It saves travel time if I stay close to the coaching centres,” he explains. The room has two narrow beds for the two occupants and a single table piled high with books.
Even success at times fails to alleviate the stress. Counselling psychologist Geetanjali Kumar talks of a recent case where a student broke down after clearing the JEE Mains. “Though she was good in science, engineering was not something that interested her and she was worried that since she had cleared JEE, her parents’ expectations from her would go up,” says Kumar, adding that she gets about 15-20 such cases every month, where parents try to pressurise their children to study engineering because they think it is a more stable career choice.

Need to listen
In her five-page suicide note, Kriti Tripathi, who jumped to her death on April 28 in Kota, accused her mother of manipulating her as a child into liking science. She warned her against doing the same with her sister. Moved by the suicides and the letters left behind by the students, Kota collector Dr Ravi Kumar Surpur recently wrote an open letter to parents advising them against putting such pressure on their children.
Meanwhile, at a coaching centre in Delhi, a group of 50 students stare uncomprehendingly when asked whether the IIT dream was theirs or their parents. “Most of those studying for engineering take it up because they have been advised by their parents that it is a safe career option or because they see others around them pursuing the same,” says IITian Gaurav Tiwari, who is faculty at a coaching centre in New Delhi. “But we can’t really expect a 16-17-year-old in India to know what he wants to do in life. If we have to empower children to make their choices, we have to change the very pattern of our education, so that a child can make an informed choice.”
In its absence, parents too spare little time to understand a child’s aptitude. “Most parents don’t try to understand their children. They lose the capacity to listen. Often they live in denial and assure themselves that the child will not really come to any harm. They prefer to believe that once they clear the tests everything will fall in place,” says Kumar. Kriti understood this. In her suicide note, she wrote, “Some might even say that she was so strong that we would never have imagined that she would do something like this… This is because I helped many come out of their depression and make a comeback. Funny, I couldn’t do that to myself”.
The single-minded focus on getting into an engineering college means that often students are not even exposed to what is happening in the world around them. “Such learning by rote may not prepare them to be an engineer in the true sense — someone with problem solving and coping ability,” says Kumar.
And India is not alone in this. In South Korea, parents send their children to institutes giving private tuitions, popularly known as crammers, to make sure they get into good universities. Unsurprisingly, Korean institutes like Etoos have opened in Kota.
Back in India, despite the rat race, some, like Rancho, Amir Khan’s character in 3 Idiots, manage to keep their inner quest alive. Very few like Rajiv Bagchi (name changed on request) actually manage to break out of the system without worrying about whether it’s too late to change track. After completing his BTech from IIT, the 28-year-old is now doing a PhD in Philosophy. The son of an engineer father, he finally realised where his interests lay.
Source: Hindustan Times, 16-05-2016
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