Involve parents in punishing ragging rogues, says UGC

University Grants Commission has asked all educational institutions in the country to spell out punishment for ragging in their prospectus and brochures, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Updated on: May 27, 2008, 02:39:51 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Hit by the the spurt in ragging incidents in 2007 despite the Supreme Court ban, the University Grants Commission has asked all educational institutions in the country to spell out punishment for ragging in their prospectus and brochures.

The commission also wants that the institutions seek an undertaking from parents that they would agree to the punishment for their wards found involved in ragging. The National Institute of Technology, Calicut, is already seeking such an undertaking. However, students involved in ragging would be given a chance to plead their case, a UGC official clarified.

The UGC, in its nation-wide circular last week, had said that punishment for students found guilty of ragging, to be mentioned in the prospectus, would be expulsion from the institution, apart from initiation of criminal proceedings. The circular is a fall-out of the Raghavan Committee meeting on April 4, which found that the number of ragging cases in 2007 had doubled, compared to 2006. It was also felt that many institutions don’t report minor cases of ragging fearing loss of reputation.

The Coalition to Uproot Ragging from Education (CURA), a group monitoring ragging cases in India, had reported 52 cases between May and September 2007, which included three suicides and three attempts to suicide cases, suspected to be resulting from harassment faced during ragging.

The UGC has also directed every institution to have an anti-ragging cell comprising teachers as well as students, where students can report ragging cases. The students would have to be briefed about this right at the time of induction, a UGC official said.

The Raghavan committee had also drawn a social profile of the victims and found that most of them were either from rural areas or socially backward communities. The institutions have been asked to provide special protection to these students.

The Supreme Court had directed educational institutions last year to lodge an FIR against the accused in ragging cases. It had also asked lower courts to hear these cases on a fast track basis. But, in many cases it had been found that the institutions had got the ragging case resolved amicably rather than acting against the accused.

The UGC has also asked institutions to conduct special campaigns to stop ragging and identify ragging hot spots such as hostels, for these campaigns.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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