UGC And Higher Education: The Plight of Women, Dalit, Adivasi Students

Soham Bhattacharya, Tinanjali Dam

When we are faced with the recent moves of the UGC to push mandatory online examinations for final year students in the country, the word that strikes is “heinous”. With European etymological origins, it means acts embedded with the verb “to hate”. We find no other vocabulary to describe UGC’s recent efforts — it is heinous at least towards a large section of students in this country. The timing couldn’t have been worse — during a pandemic, when the poor and working classes are faced with the dual threat of saving lives and livelihoods. Progressive students’ organisations have come together under the All India Forum to Save Public Education and protested against this move. The organisations, including the SFI, have marked this an exclusionary move towards the marginalised in India.

The inaction of the government to ensure dignified living conditions has been documented several times — be it the implementation of the lockdown or the pulling the economy out through fiscal expenditure — the central authorities have failed to deliver any desirable outcome to date. At the outset, it’s a circular by the UGC, released on July 6th, demanding that all final semester (or year) students appear for online exams. Under a lockdown, when even the most ‘optimistic’ PM’s Office is clueless about the vaccine production’s timeline, forcing students into writing exams of any kind is an attempt to shift the country’s pedagogy online.

In this note, our attempt is to demonstrate the magnitude of the exclusion that such attempts of the UGC can lead to in the current Indian scenario. Specifically, we find that mandatory online exams will reinstate the kind of social exclusion already faced by the marginalised in rural India — more importantly, women and students in dalit and adivasi families.

The Extent: How Digital is Indian Education?  

India, in terms of the nature of its economy and also by the residence of a majority of its population, is predominantly rural. A reliable source to measure the magnitude of the population in rural India is, of course, is census data. As per the 2011 Census of India, 69 per cent of the country’s population resides in rural India. As far as currently enrolled students are concerned, a similar share can be seen. Households with at least one student enrolled in an academic institution is 76 percent and situated in rural India. However, in the NSSO Survey on Social Consumption of Education 2017-18, we find that rural India has remained disproportionately low in terms of access to computers and the internet.  

This brazen ‘attack’ of the UGC — as it must be characterised — of imposing digital education will only allow students of less than 30 percent of households to appear for these exams. When compared with their urban counterparts, rural students have three times less access to the internet. The problem of access to computers is far graver — only 7 to 8 percent of rural households (with a student currently enrolled) have access to computers. So, when someone expects the country’s students to prepare for online exams, it essentially means that more than 90 percent of rural students, who have no access to computers, will be left to suffer. This is the magnitude of India’s digital divide. Besides, if we expect a student to travel to appear for these exams, it is like asking these students, from marginalised-rural backgrounds, to choose between saving their lives during a pandemic or choosing a career. Evidently therefore, UGC’s attempts will exclude a large section for the benefit of a few.  

This exclusion becomes clearer when we take a look at access to the internet for households belonging to primary occupational categories with at least one student currently enrolled. The mandate to conduct exams means these poor, working class households in both rural and urban India, will be discriminated against in a rather planned manner. The divide in digital/internet access is one of the several divides between the working classes and the richer sections in India. Resistance against the move of the UGC, therefore, is a question embedded in understanding the nature of the ruling classes and whom it serves. Where 60 percent of urban households with regular salaries will have a benefit to participate in online exams, 95 percent of rural working class families will suffer because of this.

The sudden rise in unemployment has hit rural India’s landless casual workers the worst during the lockdown. On top of this, yet another attempt to make the attainment of education difficult for students from these poor, working-class families is atrocious at the least. A vicious cycle of economic deprivation and lowered participation in education has already excluded the marginalised in India from academia for a long time. A new set of measures will only reinforce existing fault lines.

UGC Certified Discrimination: Exclusion of Dalit and Adivasi Students in India

Rural society is divided and organised along caste and tribe-based identities in particular. These have often been cited as the primary source of sectional deprivation and oppression even today. In fact, we have come across incidents of caste-based violence and custodial deaths of dalits during the lockdown. Education, particularly higher education, remains an important weapon for social recognition and upward mobility for the marginalised, especially for dalit and adivasi students from rural India. To survive, sustain, and achieve ‘positive freedom’, the role of higher education is obviously much more significant for the socially marginalised sections, more so because criminal forms of discrimination continues to exist in the countryside.

Table 1 indicates, how exclusionary the move from UGC will be for dalit and adivasi students in higher education in rural India. We find that out of 100 Scheduled Caste households with at least one graduate student enrolled during 2017-18, only 20 households have access to the internet. The proportion of households becomes 23 when we look at adivasi (ST) households. A simple comparison of this with dominant caste households, reveals the inequality. Exclusion from higher studies, particularly of dalit and adivasi students, stems from the Brahminical attitude of the oppressors.

The BJP-RSS-MHRD trinity institutionally bypassed the death of Rohith Vemula and Payel Tadavi before this. Today, when we are faced with another attempt to exclude, we must remember that the current regime’s casteist moves are deliberate and political too in nature. It feeds into and grows with brahminical ideals and protects the dominant caste and discriminates against the socially marginalised. The UGC’s move to complete the remaining part of the academic calendar through mandatory online exams is another display of the casteist and fraudulent practice of ‘merit-based evaluation’ that the Indian academia has been practising for centuries as a tool of exclusion.

Lockdown and Women in Higher Education

Most Indian families are organised as per the rules of patriarchy when it comes to ‘care work’ or ‘unpaid domestic work’. Economist Smriti Rao has pointed out that this work “to mobilise and allocate the labour and resources required to achieve human survival and well-being” is always associated with female members (Rao, 2020). One can think of many examples of such work — cooking, cleaning, collecting fuel, water, and other essentials — which comprise almost 10-12 hours of a day, performed mostly by women. These tasks often prohibit female members of such households from attaining education or even employment sometimes. With the lockdown, most male family members are at home. The burden of ‘care work’, however, has disproportionately increased for the women and if we see women from the age group above 14, the rise could be twice their usual allocated time. The NSSO’s urvey on education (75th Round, 2017-18) suggests that out of 100 dropped out female students at the secondary level or class 10th level, 20 have reported that they have dropped out because of excess domestic activities.

This burden, when seen in the current context of higher educational policies, reveals two concerns. Firstly, if a poor family has to procure an internet connection for education, it is less likely that expense will be taken up if the student in the family is female. Secondly, with the burden of house work, limited access to computers and the internet, the imposition of online exams as well as an evaluation based on ‘merit’, simply means that there already isn’t a level-playing field for women students.

Breaking the Divide: A Democratic Path for Digital Learning 

In their article on the recent labour law changes, Atul Sood and Paritosh Nath have pointed out that the “criminalisation of victims” is the new norm of the ruling classes in India (Sood and Nath, 2020). We have seen how using the lockdown, labourers in India are denied rights. Therefore, when we finally observe the attempts to exclude the already marginalised through UGC circulars, it is no surprise.

Education is to be seen as a right, rather than a marketable commodity. Ever since the release of the New Educational Policy Bill Draft, we have witnessed the current government’s attempts to corporatise higher education. Therefore, when we talk of breaking the divide, there is a high chance of letting in private players and dominating the market. We must remember, the alternative only needs a political will to address the inequalities. Kerala, with its Left Democratic Front government, has successfully distributed lakhs of television sets and other amenities to the marginalised and poorer sections to continue learning during the lockdown. One must remember that neither the virus nor the inequality will go away by beating drums or lighting candles — instead, it needs determined and considerate state intervention. Policies that don’t preach hatred, but implement equitable distribution of resources are the need of the hour. The fight led by the All India Forum to Save Public Education is directed at equitable policy implementation in India’s higher education sector.

References

1. Child Well-being, Schooling and Living Standards: AN OVERVIEW OF 14 VILLAGES ACROSS SIX STATES OF INDIA, Foundation for Agrarian Studies
   (http://fas.org.in/wp-content/themes/zakat/pdf/Publications/research-report/Overview-%20six%20states.pdf)
2. Rao, Smriti, Lessons from the Coronavirus: The Socialization of Care Work is Not ‘Just’ a Women’s Issue, Network Ideas (http://www.networkideas.org/news-analysis/2020/04/lessons-from-the-coronavirus-the-socialization-of-care-work-is-not-just-a-womens-issue/)
3. Sood, Atul and Nath, Paritosh, Innocuous Mistakes or Sleight of Hand? Labour Law Changes”, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 55, Issue No. 22, 30 May, 2020
   (https://www.epw.in/journal/2020/22/insight/labour-law-changes.html)

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Tinanjali Dam is a PhD candidate in Economics at Christ University, Bangalore.
Soham Bhattacharya is a PhD scholar at Economic Analysis Unit, Indian Statistical Institute, Bangalore Centre. He can be reached at: soham.bhattacharya2@gmail.com

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