Anti-ragging panel visits state

Mou Chakraborty,
Kolkata, February 6, 2007

Zero-tolerance to ragging. This is the message being disseminated by the anti ragging committee formed by the Supreme Court.
The seven-member anti ragging committee headed by R. K. Raghavan, the former director of CBI, was on a day’s visit to West Bengal. “We are quite happy with the situation here. The state government has taken a very proactive role and the situation can be further controlled if every institute has its anti ragging cell,” said Raghavan. Apart from the students and teachers, the team suggested the participation of parents in the proposed anti ragging cell.
The team went to Jadavpur University (JU) and interacted with the students and faculty. The team tried to find out what students mean by ragging and what is its content. Later in the day, the team met higher education department officials along with representatives from 16 colleges and members of various students unions.
The Raghavan committee suggested to the state to find ways to facilitative harmless interaction between the seniors and juniors. “The students told us that there are few incidents of ragging. We want the state government and the institutions to ensure that the interaction between the junior and senior students is done in a cordial manner. Mostly, the seniors mean no harm but it is due to their over enthusiasm that some incidents become big,” said Raghavan.
Answering why the team was not taken to ragging prone institutions like the Bengal Engineering & Science University (BESU), Shibpur but to JU, the additional chief secretary of higher education & science & technology department Asok M. Chakrabarti said, “Jadavpur once had a bad reputation for ragging, now it is a model of peace. We could have taken them to other places too, but since the team was on one-day visit they could not have travelled much.”
But Chakrabarti agreed that the state still has to sensitise students against ragging. “Though the reports of ragging have dropped considerably, but there are many incidents, which go unreported. We are creating an e-mail id to track such incidents,” he said. “The students cannot study in an environment where they are always fearful of seniors,” he added.
The anti ragging committee has already visited Guwahati and will now travel all over the country and then report back to the Supreme Court. If you want to report any incident of ragging you can e-mail to raging.edu@nic.in.
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