‘It was a task to make students attend classes’
Thirty-four years before she was chosen to run Hansraj College, 16-year-old Rama convinced her father in 1981 to allow her to continue with her studies by promising that she will finance her own education.
Rama was the second of the five children born to a home-maker mother and a military officer father.
Rama, the acting principal of the college since 2015, is the first women to be holding the position since the college was established in 1948. When Rama took admission in Delhi University for pursuing an undergraduate course in Hindi, she started taking part in debate competition, eyeing on the cash prize and also due to her love for a good argument.
“I won 850 prizes in debate, extra-curricular activities and poetry competitions in five years of doing undergraduate and postgraduate at DU,” says Rama, who does not use her last name.
Rama, who studied journalism after college, worked in different media houses before taking up a job as a teacher in a school. “I later joined Hansraj in 1991 and was appointed as the officiating principal in 2015,” she says.
But when Rama was offered the position, she wasn’t sure whether she will be able to do it. However, “she overcame her doubts and took up the role,” she says.
The biggest challenge was to maintain discipline in the college, whose proximity to Kamla Nagar market, had resulted into frequent bunking by students.
Also, the college used to have frequent protest by different students’ political groups.
“My first few months were spent in ensuring that students attended their classes. I took rounds of classes every day. There used to be sloganeering by political groups but I started talking to them and that helped in resolving issues faster,” she says.
As the administrative head, Rama had her fair share of people trying to pull her down. “The male teachers in the college were used to saying ‘sir’… it took them a while to say ‘yes ma’am’,” she says.
According to Rama, it is not easy for people to accept women in position of power because they are not used to it. “But the key is hard work and ignoring the detractors,” she says.