M A I N   N E W S

Anti-ragging hotline a failure
* Student calls up to say he’s getting death threats
* Call centre emails principal, forwards complaint to UGC a week later
* UGC sends letter by post to college, makes no call to check on student
Aditi Tandon
Tribune News Service

The ragging menace Year after Aman’s death, 2009-10 academic session witnessed 164 ragging cases (double than earlier year) and 19 ragging-related deaths (against 12 previously) UP tops charts, accounting for 26 of 164 cases; Andhra Pradesh has 18, TN 14, Kerela 13 and WB 11 Most deaths in Maharashtra (4); WB (4) and Punjab (3) 42 pc ragging incidents happened in engineering and medical colleges; 56 pc cases in hostels

New Delhi, November 14
July 24, 2009: A Kerala Law Academy College student calls up HRD Ministry/UGC’s anti-ragging helpline (18001801805522) to complain of repeated death threats by one Binu KC of final year. Call centre sends email to principal and forwards complaint to the UGC on August 1, saying it sends complaints to the UGC only on a weekly basis. UGC dispatches letter by post to college. Its response is still awaited. No call made to check on student though he gave his mobile number.

July 31, 2009: Student of IIRM Campus, Tagore Marg, Mansarovar, Jaipur calls up. He says seniors were forcing juniors to strip and sexually abusing them. He offers to identify the culprits. EdCIL, which runs the call center, e-mails the principal and writes to the UGC on August 8. College response awaited, no call made to student.

August 8, 2009: Student of Mahatma Gandhi Chitrakoot Gramodaya, MP, complains that teachers Bharat Mishra and Yadav sir were indulging in ragging. EdCIL messages college principal but no verification of what happened to the student.

August 15, 2009: Girl student of Techno India College of Technology, WB, complains that seniors were threatening her, sexually abusing her and touching her all the time. She says she can identify the seniors. No monitoring by EdCIL, except one e-mail to the college principal.

August 20, 2009: A student of NIT Srinagar calls up saying seniors slap and kick them, beat them up with sticks, mock them and have shaved their heads. EdCIL emails director. Again, no follow up with the student.

Twenty months after Aman Kachroo’s tragic and preventable ragging death in Tanda Medical College, the Ministry of Human Resource Development and the University Grants Commission have not learnt their lessons. They may revel in having set up a call centre to operate the much-hyped national anti-ragging helpline but investigations by The Tribune reveal the absolute mockery this helpline is making of the urgency that Supreme Court had attached to the issue.

Nineteen more ragging-deaths have been reported across the country since Aman’s demise.

The apex court had asked the HRD Ministry to run a “crisis hotline” for students, create a database by getting electronic affidavits from students at the time of registration and appoint an independent agency to monitor ragging complaints to the helpline. Neither of this has been accomplished.

The student database prepared so far is sketchy and not electronic affidavit based, as the Ministry has settled for hard copies of affidavits to be signed by the oath commissioner. These are then to be retyped into computers by respective colleges -- a mighty proposition given India’s 40 million student strength. The proposal of the NGO appointed by the UGC is more research based than monitoring based.

And here’s what the so-called crisis hotline has done: it got 1.5 lakh calls from June to December last but registered only 300 complaints. Several complaints were returned as they were either not made by “blood relations” of victims or were not accompanied by the e-mail address of the college principal, V-C or college postal address. E-mails were sent to college authorities but no phone calls were ever made to check if these e-mails reached the right people and if the complainants got justice. In over 70 per cent cases, the authorities’ response was awaited as late as December last, months after the complaints were made. Call centre operators say that they don’t have the power to make calls and so they make none, though they keep raising the matter with the UGC.

Justice is further being defeated by the bureaucratic approach to anti-ragging. EdCIL, the PSU which HRD Ministry has engaged to run the call center, forwards complaints on a weekly basis to the UGC, which makes files of them and then decides which case is fit for a written reference. The UGC in this age of Internet then sends letters through post (out of 300 complaints, it sent 180 letters) to colleges and universities for action. The action taken is not known because the call centre project approach that the SC approved never took off the way it was designed. The Ministry of Human Resource and Development simplified it because it was in a hurry to launch the helpline after Aman’s death and the Supreme Court’s order.

The Tribune has accessed minutes of the May 22, 2009, meeting in the UGC on anti-ragging where EdCIL chief Anju Banerjee admits: “Initially, the MHRD had directed EdCIL to prepare a project report for anti-ragging taking inputs from Dr Rajinder Kachroo. This mechanism, comprising an affidavit, data collection and call centre operation, would have ensured a feedback loop for complaint closure and would have enabled closed monitoring though it would have taken longer.

Later, on May 5, 2009, Secretary Higher Education (then RP Agarwal) desired that the helpline be made operational by June 15, 2009 and should be a simple system with a toll-free line. Accordingly, the system was simplified as the implementation of the earlier concept was expected to take longer. The new system allows speedy implementation but doesn’t ensure complaint closure in an objective manner.”