Caste, Higher Education, and Senthil's "Suicide"

The Senthilkumar Solidarity Committee, a group of Hyderabad intellectuals and activists, cry out against caste-ism in higher education this blog. Their cause began with the death of Senthilkumar at the University of Hyderabad. Senthilkumar, or Senthil for short, was a dalit (untouchable) student at the University of Hyderabad and was studying to be a PhD in physics. He was the first person in his entire Panniandi community to enter higher education. His parents are pig-rearers in Tamil Nadu, an depended on him for their survival. He was awarded a non-NET fellowship at the University, which is specifically designed to not be performance-based aid. However, after failing his exam, the administration publicly ended his fellowship and posted his failure on the school notice-board. Without the fellowship, Senthilkumar would be unable to attend the University. His fellow dalit students organized massive protests against such treatment, and a committee reviewed his case and reaccepted his position in the fellowship. However, this re-admittance was not announced, and even Senthil was not aware of its findings.
On February 24th, 2008, Senthil’s body was found in his dorm room. The University claimed he died from cardiac arrest, but recently released the autopsy report, which sited poisoning as a possible cause of death, along with suicide. No investigation by the police or the University was made until Dr. Ravikumar, a well-known dalit activist and a member of the Tamil Nadu legislative assembly, intervened. As of yet, there has been no progress in the case, and many members of the dalit community are understandably upset at this blatant caste bias.
The Senthilkumar Solidarity Committee claims that “Senthil was yet another victim of the entrenched realities of caste discrimination that pervade academic spaces and practices in the university”. The “brahminical ordering of institutions of higher education” is a huge problem for modern India. While officially the caste system was banned over half a century ago, the system still pervades today. Schools all over the country, from elementary level to graduate schools, have been blocking dalit access to education through various means. Interviews, special academic requirements, and public pressure all are against an untouchable’s way in to education. In the Hyderabad University Physics program, there were four dalits. Two were dropped from the non-NET fellowship due to supervisor recommendations, and Senthil allegedly committed suicide.
The Senthilkumar Solidarity Committee claims that there are still many elite institutions in the country that pride themselves on ‘purity’, meaning that they have only upper-caste members. Science, especially, is being blocked for dalits. Many upper-caste Indians believe that science is not for “the masses”, and that it “is an exclusive domain, and zealously guarded as such”. Caste prejudice in education comes in all forms: badgering of dalit students, hostel (dorm) accommodation, extracurricular activities, grades, classroom practices, and much more. And yet, nothing is being done. The SSC asks us—“How many more dropouts, humiliations, and deaths will we need before recognizing that institutions must be held accountable and the guilty punished?”

Education Push Yields Little for India's Poor

Somini Sengupta reports from Lahtora, a small village in West Bengal, on the abysmal state of government schooling in India. Sengupta visited a school in this impoverished rural area, one lacking in every aspect of modern education. Teachers who showed up, if at all, came late. The only teacher with a degree in the village never taught, but still was on the government payroll. The lucky students had rice sacks to sit on, while the others simply sat in the grass through the two hours of roll call. The head teacher, Rashid Hassan, had no idea which grades children were in. The children did not have materials provided for them and none of them were in a position to buy some themselves. Even the government’s new lunch program is failing. The program is for one hot meal a day for each student, and was designed specifically for poor areas such as Lahtora. In Hassan’s classroom, rice was piled in a corner, untouched. Hassan claimed that he could not serve it because it was unofficially given to the school. Sengupta reports that this might also be linked to the enormous problem of bribery in these small villages.
Education is a huge problem for India. 40% of India’s population is under the age of 18, and this should be a huge source of progress for the country. However, among the porrest 20 percent of Indian men, only half are literate, and not even two percent graduates from high school. In a survey of 16,000 villages in 2007, released Wednesday, found that “vast numbers of [children] could not read, write, or perform basic arithmetic”. 4 out of 10 fifth grade children cannot read at a second grade level, while 7 out of 10 of those children could not subtract. Sengupta argues that “if in the bast a largely poor and agrarian nation could afford to leave millions of its people illiterate, that is no longer the case. Not only has the roaring economy run into a shortage of skilled labor, but also the nation’s many new roads, phones, and television sets have fueled new ambitions for economic advancement among its people – and new expectations for schools to help them achieve it”.

To see the new york times' picture slideshow of the Lahtora school, click here: http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/01/17/world/20080117india_index.html.