Campus

India’s problem of substandard engineering, with graduates being unable to find jobs is something we are all familiar with. But there is a gendered story of India’s engineering colleges which is less talked of.

Girls' bodies are subjected to moral policing, shamed and treated as a distraction for boys. Often dress codes are imposed on girls and their privacy is violated in the name of checking the dress code.

A 2003 study of four science and technology higher education institutions in India found that 40% of female faculty members felt some form of gender discrimination in their respective institutions, favoring male faculty members.

Evidence from the Teen Age Girls (TAG) survey, that spoke to 74,000 girls across India, throws light on the girls that leave education early, the barriers they face, and the way forward.

The sartorial prohibitions being implemented on students convey the ideology of the educational institutions.

Several of the women, who were pictured standing upto Babul Supriyo, or have spoken up about his behaviour in Facebook after the Jadavpur University incident, have received numerous rape threats in their inbox along with some death threats.

Recently, there has been a recorded incident about how the principal of St Francis College, Hyderabad, where girls have been asked to come to college only wearing kurtis “below” their knees in length.

Recent trends show that the problems surrounding union elections and campus politics run deeper than just the usual distribution of movie tickets and free canteen food in exchange for votes. For the purpose of this article, we will be focusing on the Delhi University Student Union or DUSU Elections scheduled to be held on 12th September, 2019.

The safety of the campus space shall continue to be under threat as long as perpetrators such as Chakraborty and others have free access to this space despite the huge wave of allegations that have come up.

The obvious concern here is the adverse representation of lower castes and tribes in higher educational institutions, despite the formulation of reservation laws that were implemented five decades back. And with such a scarce representation of SC/ST groups in general, it is quite obvious that the percentage of women from these minority groups is even worse.