Dipsita Dhar, Soham, Debodeep, Hitesh
The prolonged shutdown of universities, colleges and schools has affected students everywhere on many levels. Surveys done by both governmental and non-governmental organisations depict a sharp rise in school dropouts, early marriage and a loss in basic aptitude like identifying alphabets and numbers among school-going children. The over emphasis on online education has given birth to a digital divide, uncommon before 2019. The idea of “subscription”-based learning that the government pushes in the context of the pandemic has further alienated those at the margins i.e., those who lack economic and socio-cultural capital. The pandemic has already intensified the existing gender gap in education, and this has especially affected women from low income groups.
There exists a 50% gender gap in mobile internet users in India, where 21% of women and 42% of men use mobile internet. Moreover, an assessment on issues faced by adolescents during COVID-19 reveals that more boys than girls have access to digital infrastructure such as mobile phones, internet services, radio and other media. With such low access to technology, digital schooling will further disengage girls from education and widen educational inequalities among learners. In addition to this, the shutting down of hostels have majorly hit girl students from deprived sections. There are lakhs who live in 44 thousand hostels across the country and 52% among them are specifically for women. There are 1,012 hostels designated for socially backward communities, run by the Department of Social Justice, Government of India. What has happened to these hostels and its occupants during these two years of Covid-19? The Indian Researcher team spoke to few of them to understand the degree of discomfort that has been caused.
Table 1: Students enrolled in higher education and their proportion in hostels in India, 2017-18
| Gender | ST | SC | OBC | Other | All Groups |
| Male | 16.3 | 11.0 | 42.3 | 30.4 | 100.0 |
| Female | 17.0 | 19.3 | 33.1 | 30.6 | 100.0 |
| Total | 16.6 | 14.6 | 38.4 | 30.5 | 100.0 |
R came to Ghodegaon Govt Tribal Hostel, Pune after she taking a BCom degree admission at the B D Kale Mahavidyalay. Her village was two hours away from her college, but the government hostel made the situation easy. She was happy to finally fulfil her dream of becoming independent and supporting her family. Initially when the pandemic hit, she was relieved to go back to home as she could be with her parents and take care of younger siblings. She never expected that her return to the hostel would take this long. A few classes were irregular and the network didn’t let her attend lectures completely. There were even times when they ran out of money to recharge their internet packs when the whole family was struggling to survive the pandemic. To help her family, R started working in the nearby field, where there were many like her. Students who could not afford a smartphone and were unable to cope with distance learning were pushed out of the education system. She knows many girls in her village who will never go back to their classes as they were married off during the pandemic, at times without consent.
There was similar distress in T’s voice, who stayed in the Bhosari Girl’s Hostel and now has gone back to Talegaon, Junnar, where her family lives. She complains that she hasn’t received her scholarship money since 6 months, that the office stopped responding after a few calls, and that it’s not possible for her to visit her college due to bad transport facilities and of course, insufficient money. Though she has dropped out from her course, T dreams that one day she will complete the degree when “things are better”.
S, a third year student who used to live in the J M Bhosale hostel, took up a job in Pune to support herself and found an accommodation nearby. Now, she doesn’t want to go back to her village and the poverty and misery from which she had escaped when she joined college.
Table 2: Dependence on hostels by place of residence for students in higher education, 2017-18
| Residence/ Caste Group | ST | SC | OBC | Others | Column1 |
| Rural | 21.5 | 15.1 | 38.9 | 24.6 | 100.0 |
| Urban | 4.9 | 13.3 | 37.2 | 44.5 | 100.0 |
| Total | 16.6 | 14.6 | 38.4 | 30.5 | 100.0 |
19-year-old D lives with her parents and siblings in a small village near Kerala’s Kochi. A Bachelor’s student from a Dalit working class family and a first generation learner, she is a student of Russian at a top university in New Delhi. She had left her home for the first time when she came to New Delhi with thousands of dreams in her eyes. Though the city seemed expensive, the university’s hostel facility seemed affordable and the Means-Cum-Merit (MCM) scholarship took care of the mess bill and other expenses. Nevertheless, she had to go back when the university shut down and ordered students to leave their hostel rooms as soon as possible. From then on, D has been “stuck” at her home. She has to attend online classes every day as she is marked for her daily attendance and class performance. Even through days with sudden power cuts, network issues, noisy neighbours or some unavoidable domestic work, she tries to put up a straight face and attend her classes. The day she had a viva exam, it rained profusely. The network was unstable and the teacher could hardly hear her answers. Now she is not sure whether she will be given a grade according to her viva-performance or on her internet connectivity. At home she needs to take care of house chores as both her parents have to go for daily wage work, post-Covid the situation has become tougher. D says she doesn’t mind doing household work, someone has to, but it does take a lot of her time that she might have used for herself when in hostel. Her brother is in school, and at times he too has his online classes at the same time with D, but the family has only one smartphone. D and her brother will share their one smartphone accordingly, as they share their rooms, their meals, their dreams. She has a dream of an UPSC aspirant, dignity in the society, to take care of her family. This pandemic and unplanned lockdown have forced her to forget her dreams in the long race of survival.
K from Bangalore is a Science postgraduate interested in Oceanography. For almost a year, she has been at home as the hostels are shut. She has been attending online sessions, but is unsure how lab experiments can take place online. Two semesters with hardly any lab classes and if this continues, she doubts if she will be able to compete with others. Hailing from an OBC family, access to internet or smart phones are not exactly issues. When asked whether she feels burdened with domestic responsibility, she said, “Yes, we are expected to do some chores, but my parents understand. They don’t force me if I am occupied with classes and assignments. I kind of feel guilty for doing so”. According to her, the hostel gives students more opportunity to think about themselves and their careers — there is no “society” that one is answerable to, no relatives enquiring about marriage, scrutinising on what she wears. Once at home, there are too many boundaries, norms and restrictions. At times it gets “suffocating”, she says.
Privacy is Not a Luxury Good: Sundar Pichai
Hostel for these students was an escape from impoverishment, hunger, humiliation and a pathway to start a journey for a better tomorrow. For girls especially, it was also a way to escape societal patriarchy and the varied restrictions within the family. Their hostel room or campus provided a chance to create a space of their own, with greater privacy and autonomy than their own homes. It might have a piece of their home, religious beliefs or piece of home décor reminding them of their roots, but it also had different curtains, floor mats, memories and experiences that they had gathered during their hostel life — from a stray peacock feather to political pamphlets, a copy of The Annihilation of Caste, posters of Fidel Castro, Savitri Bai, Clara Zetkin, the tiny rooms of Godavari or Sreeniketan hostels represent resistance and confidence. This privacy and hostel-space seemed luxurious for most students we spoke to, who otherwise stayed either in rented accommodation, shared homes or even without proper residence. The joy of being independent was the incentive that hostel life provided, besides offering opportunities to question their upbringing, challenging patriarchy and capitalism. The more we delay in reopening our hostels, colleges, university campuses, the more we see the dreams of these women getting buried.
“Domestic Work is Women’s Work”: Random Uncle
Education in India is not only about knowledge production or receiving a degree. It is also about using education as tool for social mobility. A life in hostels gives women a chance to break free from gender roles and helps them in understanding their skills to compete in the job market. Physical mobility to a more secular space is required in building a non-gendered work culture for women. According to the NSS 75th Round Survey (Key Indicators of Household Social Consumption on Education in India), “among the percentage of ever enrolled women (3-35 years) currently not attending education, 30.2% reported engagement in domestic activities as their reason for discontinuing education.”
Table 3: Time spent on an average in domestic work, age group 18-30 years with education as principal activity status, minutes, 2019
| Gender | Rural | Urban |
| Male | 24.6 | 25.8 |
| Female | 136.8 | 98.4 |
“Many girls’ responsibilities in terms of household work and caregiving are likely to have increased during the school closures — reducing the time available for studying. Indeed, research shows that when primary caregivers are missing from the household (which may often be the case during the pandemic/as a result of COVID-19), girls are often given additional responsibilities in terms of caregiving and household tasks — further reducing the time available for studying and reducing their overall engagement in schooling.” Globally, girls aged 5–14 years already spend 40% more time in household work than boys. Before COVID-19, India had 30 million out-of-school children, out of which 40% were adolescent girls. It is projected that post COVID-19, close to 10 million secondary school girls might dropout and a large number of these can be from India. The fear is that as more women get tied down to their homes and domesticity, breaking these gender roles will remain an unattainable dream, not only for them but their future generations as well.
Early Marriage Reduces Rape: Om Prakash Chautala
While away in the hostel, the family was not so bothered about marriage, but with the lockdown and hostels shutting down, many parents are pushing their children into early marriage. A young girl “simply sitting” at home brings unnecessary “trouble” to the family — societal pressure, unwanted advances and overall financial pressure on the family. Marriage can, thus, “solve” multiple issues, it compensates for their “unproductivity”, and it “takes care” of the security of the woman; the prolonged economic crisis has made it difficult to carry even one extra person in the family and an early marriage relieves this pressure. Such baseless arguments are offered by hetero-patriarchy everywhere. India already bears the world’s largest share of child brides, equalling 23 million, and this is predicted to have risen due to the pandemic. ChildLine India has reported a 17% increase in distress calls related to early marriage of girls in 2020 June and July, compared to 2019.
“Par yeh kyu nai bataya, ki mujhe ghar ke andar bhi careful rehna hai”: Highway (2014)*
According to the recently published data from NCRB, 3,71,503 cases of crimes against women were reported in 2020, i.e.. a daily average of 77 cases. In a year which saw the wrath of the pandemic and subsequent lockdowns, it’s shocking to see even their own homes were not safe for women. One can find a scarier picture if we dig the data more. The maximum number of crimes were done by people known to the victim. A whopping 1,11,594 cases were put under the category “cruelty by husband or relative” — dowry, molestation etc. For many girls, the trauma of sexual violence actually starts from their own homes, bathrooms, locked rooms, balconies, etc. Returning to these traumatic spaces, staying with the abusers or enablers affect the mental well-being of these young survivors who had started to heal by dislocating themselves from these spaces of trauma.
The closing of hostels are surely going to have a long-standing impact on the participation of women in higher education and in the overall mobility of girls. As per a report published by UNESCO, “Following the Ebola outbreak and school closures in Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia, enrolment rates for girls dropped. Increased rates of poverty, household responsibilities, child labour and teenage pregnancy as well as restrictive school policies prevented many girls from returning to the classroom. The epidemic also reduced funding for education as governments diverted funds to public health and put a strain on the pre-existing teacher shortage.”
Residential educational institutions and independent hostels were effective in creating alternative spaces that had the opportunity to form a more democratic, liberating and participative atmosphere. Hostels were instrumental in deconstructing a space where girls were not always introduced in reference to their fathers, brothers or husbands, but as themselves. Yes, there are gender biases, cases of caste discrimination, intimate partner violence, and sexual harassment here too, but in most campuses, the student community at large had been fighting this collectively. Who would have expected the female hosteller of Haryana to march for equal timing of hostel entry and who could imagine students, led by the girls of Banaras Hindu University, will take the Yogi Government on its head by demanding a safe space against moral policing? The four walls of their hostels taught many to break the “pinjra” (cage). With prolonged closure of hostels and loss of autonomous spaces, will the mobility of women be curbed? Or will they find another way to negotiate and fight with the obstacles that this pandemic has thrown at them? The answer lies in the long battle against patriarchy, capitalism and privatisation. We can only ask for all women to get united, demand university campuses to reopen and for more empowerment schemes for female students.
*Why wasn’t I told that I had to be “careful” in my own home too?
Dipsita Dhar is the All India Joint Secretary of the Student’s Federation of India (SFI). She is the Editor of Indian Researcher, the annual inter-disciplinary research journal of SFI and and a PhD Scholar at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.
Soham is a Research Associate with the Indian Researcher and a PhD Scholar at the Indian Statistical Institute, Bangalore.
Debodeep is a Research Associate with the Indian Researcher and is a Master’s student in Data Science at the Sapienza University, Rome.
Hitesh is a Research Associate with the Indian Researcher. He has a Master’s in Development Studies from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. He works with the Foundation of Agrarian Studies, Bangalore.
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