A school student in Guwahati attempts suicide, just one of the many in a Malaise that now runs rampant across the country, writes Monalisa Gogoi
For an institution that attempts to teach – or cash in on, by claiming – the best of both the West and India in its curriculum, the Gurukul Grammar Senior Secondary School in Guwahati recently shocked the people of the city when Nabanita Das, a Class 8 student, jumped off the building's second floor in a bid to kill herself. The reason: as punishment she had been asked to write a thousand times that she “would not speak in Assamese” while in school. Even as teachers seemed to coerce students into telling agitating students of the Guwahati Students’ Union and the media that this was an institution where “even after being English we learn the xatriya (a classical Assamese dance form)”, and the administration, along with the state Human Rights Commission ordered inquiries, the standards the school had set became apparent when barely within a week of Nabanita’s attempted suicide, two of its Class 9 students, both drunk, went missing in the Brahmaputra. A third, who was still in an inebriated state when the police picked him up, explained: they had gone to the riverside to discuss a ‘project’ that involved deciding whether they should speak in English or Assamese in school, something that the school denies.
If Gurukul Grammar School had turned out to be a classic case of schooling gone awry (its principal had allegedly molested a student only a year earlier), the situation, so far as suicides are concerned, according to experts, has just about gone out of hand. The problem is rampant: at least 12 students in Mumbai committed suicide in January for various reasons, a situation that sent the education establishment into a tizzy. In one case, the police registered a complaint against the principal for abetting suicide when Abdul Shaikh, a Class 8 student, killed himself after being threatened with suspension. In another case, a 15-year-old student, Rajesh Yadav, also from Mumbai, hanged himself after being suspended from school for bunking classes. “Students are under pressure from their parents to study and sometimes this becomes excessive; sometimes they even suffer abuse at the hands of their teachers,” says Suresh Shetty, Maharashtra minister for public health and youth welfare. Shetty himself cites a case where his daughter’s friend asked if he could help as she was being abused by her teacher and “her parents didn’t care”. Sudheendra Kulkarni, chairman of the Observer Research Foundation in Mumbai, attributes the spate of student suicides in Maharashtra to its “chaotic urbanisation”.
For an institution that attempts to teach – or cash in on, by claiming – the best of both the West and India in its curriculum, the Gurukul Grammar Senior Secondary School in Guwahati recently shocked the people of the city when Nabanita Das, a Class 8 student, jumped off the building's second floor in a bid to kill herself. The reason: as punishment she had been asked to write a thousand times that she “would not speak in Assamese” while in school. Even as teachers seemed to coerce students into telling agitating students of the Guwahati Students’ Union and the media that this was an institution where “even after being English we learn the xatriya (a classical Assamese dance form)”, and the administration, along with the state Human Rights Commission ordered inquiries, the standards the school had set became apparent when barely within a week of Nabanita’s attempted suicide, two of its Class 9 students, both drunk, went missing in the Brahmaputra. A third, who was still in an inebriated state when the police picked him up, explained: they had gone to the riverside to discuss a ‘project’ that involved deciding whether they should speak in English or Assamese in school, something that the school denies.
If Gurukul Grammar School had turned out to be a classic case of schooling gone awry (its principal had allegedly molested a student only a year earlier), the situation, so far as suicides are concerned, according to experts, has just about gone out of hand. The problem is rampant: at least 12 students in Mumbai committed suicide in January for various reasons, a situation that sent the education establishment into a tizzy. In one case, the police registered a complaint against the principal for abetting suicide when Abdul Shaikh, a Class 8 student, killed himself after being threatened with suspension. In another case, a 15-year-old student, Rajesh Yadav, also from Mumbai, hanged himself after being suspended from school for bunking classes. “Students are under pressure from their parents to study and sometimes this becomes excessive; sometimes they even suffer abuse at the hands of their teachers,” says Suresh Shetty, Maharashtra minister for public health and youth welfare. Shetty himself cites a case where his daughter’s friend asked if he could help as she was being abused by her teacher and “her parents didn’t care”. Sudheendra Kulkarni, chairman of the Observer Research Foundation in Mumbai, attributes the spate of student suicides in Maharashtra to its “chaotic urbanisation”.
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