Destroying a Dream

Destroying a Dream

The following is a nice summary of challenges for Dalits in both lower and higher education. It's a great article by a famous Western scholar who has become an Indian citizen.

Destroying a dream
By Gail Omvedt
The Week, Aug. 17, 2008
Destroying a Dream

Atrocities are events that happen in villages. We recoil at scenes of the brutal slaughter of a young couple breaking caste rules to seek love; naked and beaten bodies of a family which had had the gall to cultivate land that dominant caste villagers wanted; police kicking a pregnant woman in the stomach until she has a miscarriage.

Or we may think of the atrocities of daily life: low-paid and scorned labour, having to endure the humiliation of separate tea cups in hotels and lack of equal access to water of the village well, the temple, street or public square where Dalits are not welcome.

We do not think of atrocities as events that happen in schools. Education, after all, has been the dream of so many Dalit and non-Dalit youth from the supposedly 'superior' and the supposedly 'low' castes. Universities, research institutes and colleges are supposed to be places for 'free play of the mind', and where thinking is taught.

Schools are supposed to be training grounds for the India of tomorrow, free from the slime and degradation of the past. Every social reformer and revolutionary has focused on education; the reservation of 'seats' in educational institutions has been a central hope for the destruction of caste differences.

Yet, when a Dalit boy or girl steps into an educational institution, it may be their first step of confronting a humiliation unknown outside of their kin and caste circles. Schoolteachers may scorn them, treating them as unable to 'speak right' or think clearly, often expecting them to do the menial tasks, such as cleaning toilets ("After all, this is YOUR work.") and beating them brutally when they don't-an experience of Dalit girls in a village near Coimbatore.

College teachers may treat them as 'reserved' students, as not really capable of being taught, sometimes failing them, sometimes passing them without giving any encouragement or paying attention to their work. (This can happen even in top institutions; it has been reported, for instance, by JNU students that professors would do the latter.) Fellow students can reveal with every word the inherited ways of thinking; there are many examples of 'caste' students refusing noon meals if cooked by Dalit teachers.

In 2007, two research scholars of IISc-Bangalore, committed suicide. For V. Ajay Shree Chandra, a Dalit boy, it was discrimination, rejection of his work and verbal abuse that led him to end his life. For R. Chaitra, an OBC girl, it was pressure from family to marry against her wishes. In Kerala, Rajani S. Anand, a Dalit student of engineering, committed suicide as she could not get a loan to fund her studies. Dalit students at AIIMS have been abused.

Various special schemes for Dalit and Adivasi students often exist only on paper. For example, a Navodaya model school with 163 Dalit students from all over Karnataka, located near a reserve forest in Dakshina Kannada district, has no science laboratory, science teacher or sports ground, and all teachers are on contract (which means they do not benefit from government salaries and are insecure and poorly paid).

The result is backwardness in education. Dalit literacy remains significantly lower than the average and drop-out rates have gone up. As per a report by the Comptroller and Auditor General released on August 3, 2008, this rate increased in 2003-04 from 2001-02 in several states. Literacy rates for SCs and STs were 55 per cent and 47 per cent, according to the 2001 Census, compared with the national average of 65 per cent.

Education has been the hope of free India and the dream of social revolutionaries who hoped to free their people from the menial and scorned work of the past. But the road to education is not a free, four-lane highway. For the Dalits, it is full of potholes, speedbreakers and roadblocks.

Omvedt is fellow, Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla.