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Nov 15, 2020

Why Aishwarya Reddy's Death by Suicide Calls for a Reckoning

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The mere distribution of laptops or providing access to the Internet cannot help. We must assess how at every step of the way ‘the system’ failed the 19-year-old student.
Aishwarya Reddy. Photo: Twitter/@SurajKrBauddha

The news of Aishwarya Reddy’s suicide on November 2, 2020 must not become another bit of statistic. It is a moment of reckoning.

Reckoning can mean ‘the action or process of calculating or estimating something’ but also, ‘the avenging or punishing of past mistakes or misdeeds’. We know how the second meaning has been interpreted in recent times, and how willfully un-informed, hate-ridden and profit-driven are those channels of reckoning. As teachers, it is the first meaning of the word that we seek to unravel.

How do we even begin to identify or estimate all the micro and macro factors that drive a bright nineteen-year-old student in ‘New India’ to take her own life, leaving behind a note in which she has apologised for being a ‘burden’ to her family?

A family that had mortgaged their house to send her to study mathematics at a prestigious college in Delhi; her younger sister had dropped out of school so that the older sibling could continue her higher education.

The lockdown has affected the livelihood of millions in the Indian subcontinent. This frightening ongoing process as a de-humanising phenomenon in an already hugely uneven playing field has generated very little public discourse in the realm of education. (Except the brief spurts of ‘yes’ and ‘no’ to the holding of public service examinations.) Much of the fallout has been accepted as a fait accompli, stirring very little private conversation amongst those who do not have to worry about everyday needs. At most, one hears occasionally of ‘the digital divide’. An otherwise responsible and sympathetic news channel reported the student’s suicide with the phrase ‘she did not even have a laptop’ (emphasis added). Aishwarya’s is not the only suicide whose final or most visible trigger was a lack of access to technological devices meant to ensure equal access.

Also Read: An Uphill Task: Students in Kargil Village Attend Online Classes Atop a Mountain

But, will the distribution of free laptops and free smartphones to each and every one of our school-going children and college-going youth take care of the ever-increasing divides in 21st century India?

Surely, we ought to probe further into the world we inhabit and into ourselves? We believe we must probe why, at every step of that, which we refer to as ‘the system’, failed Aishwarya, and failed her inexorably.

Aishwarya was on a government scholarship which was due in March and which she had not received at the time of death in November. The scholarship is named INSPIRE. It is a fact that grants and scholarships for which we often sign receipts in advance come to us very late, and often, not the entire amount. The inordinate delay makes us unquestioningly and gratefully accept whatever we eventually ‘receive’ as largesse.

This bright young woman did not come to believe that she had become ‘a burden on her family’ because she had to be married off with a dowry (and we remember those deaths too), but because her dream was to study and make something of her life.

Aishwarya had already proved her mettle. She had scored very high marks in her school leaving examination and she wanted to study in a good college. She had dreams of becoming an IAS officer and realised a part of that dream by coming all the way from Telangana to study at the University of Delhi.

Lady Shri Ram College. Photo: lsr.edu.in

Her college, located in India’s capital, had asked her to vacate her hostel room during the COVID-19 lockdown, as many institutions all over the country had done. The Wire has published the sequence of correspondences on the question of outstation students that the hostel union of Aishwariya’s college had carried on with the college authorities, particularly about the need for a place to stay during a pandemic. When online classes began, Aishwarya asked her father for a second-hand computer. She faced difficulties coping with classes and practicals over a phone.

After the news of her death broke, her college principal gave a statement that the student never reached out for help and therefore no one knew about Aishwarya’s difficulties. In fact, her college students’ union had in September 2020 conducted a survey when they learned that 27.5% of the students did not have a laptop and 39.4% said that they did not have good internet connection. Aishwariya was one of the respondents. The result of that survey was sent to the college authorities. In the first year, Aishwariya had applied for a freeship and had received Rs 12,000 in April of this year. In her second year at college, she had no means to cope.

Aishwarya’s death brings to the foreground the number of deaths of students all over the country in the past few months of the pandemic, whose forced return to their homes often in places with inadequate network capacities, sometimes with not enough electricity and lack of digital modes to study, have put an unbearable burden on their slender backs. Who can they turn to?

Many young people have taken their lives and many more are in a state of breakdown. As teachers, who have also been forced to go online with little support, we can speak first hand of the immense toll this is taking on both teachers and students. Aishwarya’s death must make us pause to think of how we, as a largely indifferent and de-humanised society, are failing our young. For every one such death that finds mention in the media, there are thousands that we will never know of.

This essay can touch only on a few of the factors in a larger nexus that are driving our young to despair. If COVID-19 is a ‘natural calamity’, the relentless push for a digital education without taking into consideration the sharp economic and social disparities amongst our students is not a natural calamity. It is part of an enforced ‘vision’ of a digital nation, whose imperative is to ride roughshod over gross inequities, across the divisions of caste, gender and class. It is a knee jerk reaction to make up for classroom teaching without even trying to identify and address the needs of each and every one of our students.

Refreshing diverse nature of Indian public universities

For anyone who has set foot in a public Indian university, whether Central or state-funded, will be aware of the refreshingly diverse and the hugely disparate nature of the students assembled in its environs. While teaching, one has to constantly balance content, medium and mode of pedagogy to reach out meaningfully to such a heterogeneous and vast cross-section of young people. In short, there can never be a uniform scale of rendering knowledge nor may one expect uniformity of reception. That independent India had created such calibrated heterogeneous spaces that combined quality education with democratic practices is something we must be proud of. We cannot abandon it for a top-down package of teaching/learning over which we have little control.

Also Read: To No One’s Surprise, Online Schooling Has Started Taking a Psychological Toll on Students

Can we push for a digital mode of teaching/learning in such diverse classrooms without understanding and empathizing with the socio-economic backgrounds of our students? The paucity of this perception amongst our policymakers and administrators only exacerbates iniquities on the ground.

We have to come up with humane policies that emerge from ‘regarding the pain of others’. We have to create, consciously and painstakingly, a thoughtful and flexible system, keeping in mind and adjusting to local conditions.

In the age of COVID-19, we must create a thoughtful and flexible system keeping in mind local conditions. Photo: Sergey Zolkin/Unsplash CC BY-SA

Opening up the doors of higher education and enabling first-generation students does not mean dumbing down, coupled with a relentless process of outsourcing. The solution is not mechanical correction and pre-fabricated multiple-type questions. Rather, it is about empowering the teaching and student community.

How do we bring about a society which respects and not only pays lip service to knowledge, to thinking and to articulation?

The teaching community must come together and put together, stitch by stitch, a fabric that will be resilient, inclusive and yet not a ready-made template. The dreams of our young must be nurtured and not at the cost of lives.

Rimli Bhattacharya teaches at the Department of English, University of Delhi and Debjani Sengupta teaches at the Department of English, IP College.

If you know someone – friend or family member – at risk of suicide, please reach out to them. The Suicide Prevention India Foundation maintains a list of telephone numbers (www.spif.in/seek-help/) they can call to speak in confidence. You could also refer them to the nearest hospital.

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