Admission of Guilt
TMC student unions are implicated in a college entry racket
Astudent’s suicide and a flood of complaints from admissionseekers alleging extortion by Trinamool Congress-affiliated student unions has forced the Mamata Banerjee government to revamp the process of admissions to colleges in West Bengal.
On June 6, Amlan Sarkar, a young student who scored 79 per cent marks in his school board exams, committed suicide after failing to secure admission to either of the two Kolkata colleges he applied to. Days before that, Arnab Ray, an 18-year-old from Rampurhat, alleged that “union boys demanded Rs 30,000” from him for admission to the journalism course at central Kolkata’s Surendranath College. This, despite the fact that his name was third on the merit list posted on the college website.
Reports say a significant section of some 1.5 million students seeking college admissions in the state, have been compelled to pay money to student unions to get subjects of their choosing. Although college unions affiliated to the ruling TMC have ‘controlled’ the admission process for some years now, the extortion has clearly breached a threshold this year.
On July 2, a girl student whose identity has been kept secret landed at the chief minister’s residence complaining that the TMC students’ union at Kolkata’s Mahindra Chandra College had demanded Rs 20,000 for admission to an undergraduate course.
Evidently rattled, Mamata made a surprise visit to her alma mater—Bhowanipore’s Ashutosh College—to verify the facts for herself. Hours later, police arrested six TMC union leaders of different colleges and raided the homes of 17 other partymen. Meanwhile, the state education department stepped in to scrap the entire process of counselling (wherein students are required to present their certificates for verification). All colleges were directed to conduct admissions online.
People familiar with the admission process say unions have routinely been appropriating 10 per cent of the seats, in some cases even usurping the principal’s discretionary quota. ‘Help desks’, ostensibly set up by union leaders to help newcomers, are used to sell seats to students who can pay.
The CPI(M)-affiliated Students’ Federation of India’s Srijan Bhattacharjee alleges that the TMC unions have been extorting Rs 70,000 to Rs 1 lakh from individual students. A Kolkata college teacher says the students’ unions also use the admissions process to expand their own membership.
Meanwhile, opposition leaders have dismissed the arrest of TMC student union leaders as a “gimmick”. They say it’s to deflect public attention and send out a message that Mamata Banerjee doesn’t endorse such corrupt practices in colleges.
Whatever the case, with online admissions the new norm, hundreds of students who paid huge sums to the union boys for admission, are now left in the lurch.