Dr. Asangba Tzudir
After all the ‘mudslinging’ episodes, Jawaharlal Nehru University is once again thrown into the limelight on the heels of the hiked hostel fees. They have once again become a subject of intense public scrutiny. The Delhi police who had recently played rabbits in front of the lawyers became merciless lions. Their canes and boots fell upon students and even teachers who had marched about 10 kms towards parliament demanding a rollback on the hike imposed on hostel fees. The telegraph reported that, “a teacher who had just persuaded the students to make way for traffic, was kicked, punched and caned by two policemen who accused him of ‘teaching students to protest.’” The same uniform that they were wearing pricked the integrity associated with it when they were thrashed by lawyers, and not when they were thrashing the students.
It is reported that the JNU Administration’s fee hike nearly doubles the annual expense for students living in hostels to Rs. 55,000-61,000 making it India’s most expensive central university. Though there was a partial roll-back for students below poverty line (BPL), it did not satisfy the students. A segment of the hike includes room rent at Rs. 300/600 which was Rs. 10/20. The increase in the rate is because of the service charge, which either does not exist for many universities or, is charged with the hostel fee.
Though the administration has tried to justify the hike saying that there hasn’t been a revision in fees in the last 19 years, the rationale of the protest by the students in JNU brings to fore the economic and moral standpoint. That, the hike will drive out most of the students who come from underprivileged backgrounds. Accordingly, 40% of the students in JNU come from underprivileged category.
Should the fees be hiked on the justification that it has not been revised for 19 years? Should the hike be imposed knowing that the move is going to affect 40% of the students? Looking from the point of ‘Education for all’, such a move can be considered not just as a discriminatory move but more so an agenda towards curtailing the voice of the students, considering the fact that JNU is a politically vibrant as well as a sensitive university, and one that has lent strong voices of resentment on governmental policies and functioning.
Now if 40% of the students who come from underprivileged category is forced to leave JNU because of the price rise, the political demography and vibrancy will lose its flavor in JNU, and along with it the voice of ‘truth’, ‘rights’, ‘liberties’ and ‘justice’ will diminish. Is it what the centre wants? Is it their larger agenda working through the hike in hostel fees, along with other mechanisms in play.
In the wake of the protests in universities on a number of disastrous policy level changes – huge fund cuts for the University Grants Commission; state governed divestment from the higher education in the name of graded autonomy; tampering with reservation policy in both drawing up recruitment and in college administration; casualisation and reduction of employment in universities; widespread corruption; as well as authoritarian clampdown on free speech and thought; the latest move which is going to affect 40% of the students in JNU once again puts education in a poor shade, more so, for all what the objective and purpose of education is directed at, it sadly continues to be victimized.
(Dr. Asangba Tzudir contributes a weekly guest editorial to The Morung Express. Comments can be mailed to asangtz@gmail.com)
