Pushing students to the edge
Coaching institutes must be regulated with more rigour
The pressure to succeed can often prove fatal. Last week, a 17-year-old girl aspiring to be a doctor from rural Andhra Pradesh hanged herself at her Hyderabad hostel. Samyuktha, who had scored 95% in class 12 and enrolled at a coaching institute to prepare for the entrance exams , left a note behind, which mentioned the growing pressure of expectations. Last month, unable to tolerate the jibes of his teachers who insisted he wasn’t good enough, another 17-year-old student in Andhra Pradesh jumped off a building. In the last two months alone, more than 50 students have reportedly committed suicide across Telangana and Andhra Pradesh. On Wednesday, disturbed by all this, Andhra Pradesh chief minister Chandrababu Naidu met managers of educational institutes. Andhra and Telangana are not alone. In the coaching hub of Kota in Rajasthan, where 175,000 students go every year dreaming of clearing engineering and medical exams, a hostel association has installed ‘suicide-proof’ fans in students’ rooms, in a short-sighted move to address the problem without going into the root causes. The 2016 National Crime Record Bureau data said at least 17 students committed suicide in Kota owing to the fear of failure. Because of the limited number of seats in State-run institutes, for every successful person, there are thousands of others who don’t make the cut.
Earlier this year, in April, the HRD ministry had written to states asking them to regulate private coaching institutions, expressing concern over the spate of suicides. Since the regulation of secondary education is a state subject, the onus of evolving such a mechanism falls upon the states. The government’s efforts aside, the inability to procure admission into an engineering college should not be viewed as worth ending one’s life for. Despite the obsession with engineering, 80% of the engineers in India are unemployable, says the National Employability Report 2016 by Aspiring Minds. It is because education is solely focused on the job market that so much pressure is being put on students, but the aim of the authorities should be to convince students that education is part of a larger process of acquiring knowledge.