Courage. And, dreams. For anyone in late teens, these are the words weaving the head and heart, especially if someone from an underprivileged background wants to go for higher studies.
In a dimly lit hostel room — those were the days of tungsten bulbs with warm yellow light — on the Visva-Bharati campus, one of my friends started his story. And, another followed. And others, shortly thereafter. Sharing maybe caring. In that early winter night, i felt that i'm the most privileged among them all although my father retired a year ago and our family was going through a crisis, though not much financial.
A farmer in Malda who lost his last few cottahs of land to the mighty Ganga but did not tell his son, as the latter, preparing for GATE, would be tense. After the exam, he went back home only to find his village obliterated from the Earth; his parents and relatives taking shelter in a high school. Today, 20 years later, the student is back as a professor in one of the top engineering colleges in the country after a long stint at a university in the US.
Or, the boy from a nondescript village in Jharkhand who once took part in the movement for a separate state as a schoolkid. After his post-graduation in the university, founded by educationist Rabindranath Tagore, the once-firebrand rebel is now a senior officer in the Indian government. Such anecdotes are galore.
Visva-Bharati, declared a central university in 1951, 10 years after Tagore breathed his last, has groomed students from different sections of the society for decades to live up to the poet's dream. Unlike universities in the state, Visva-Bharati and other central universities in India are directly monitored by the Union government, and more importantly fees are quite low compared to private ones. When we studied, the hostel fee was Rs 18 per month and tuition fees Rs 15. The kitchen charges for food — lunch and dinner — were around Rs 400 per month. Before the year-end exams, we used to queue up to pay around Rs 700 in all, including exam fees.
Why am i writing this? At a time when there's a clamour on the social media, and in some mainstream media too, in the past few days about raising fees in government universities, i was compelled to revisit my past when a bed in a hostel in my university, Visva-Bharati, seemed worth a lakh. Not many could afford Rs 500 for a bed in a cramped mess outside the campus plus another Rs 1,000 for lunch-and-dinner dabba service every month. Of course we had students from affluent class also for whom such hostels were out of bounds as they used to ride expensive motorcycles while staying on rent at houses in Bolpur and Santiniketan and many of us had to do with second-hand ramshackled bicycles.
But we all were happy in the hostel, which accommodated around 300 students, including PhD research scholars. Now, we are talking about doing away with subsidies in higher education — something that successive governments have infamously achieved to do with hardly any increase in budget for central universities. When i recall faces of the students, must be some hundreds, in our and other hostels, i can see the joy and mirth in them playing cricket or football or volleyball while excelling in studies and research. If we, the taxpayers, now withdraw the subsidy, we will not only send them to the dungeons of a deadly future but also will rob their courage to even pursue the dream.
Amid all these, we, the people, confer institute of eminence tag to private universities, including those yet to take off, and try to justify our stand to raise hostel fees in traditional central universities manifold, sometimes 300%. Irony cannot be better than this, perhaps.
In a dimly lit hostel room — those were the days of tungsten bulbs with warm yellow light — on the Visva-Bharati campus, one of my friends started his story. And, another followed. And others, shortly thereafter. Sharing maybe caring. In that early winter night, i felt that i'm the most privileged among them all although my father retired a year ago and our family was going through a crisis, though not much financial.
A farmer in Malda who lost his last few cottahs of land to the mighty Ganga but did not tell his son, as the latter, preparing for GATE, would be tense. After the exam, he went back home only to find his village obliterated from the Earth; his parents and relatives taking shelter in a high school. Today, 20 years later, the student is back as a professor in one of the top engineering colleges in the country after a long stint at a university in the US.
Or, the boy from a nondescript village in Jharkhand who once took part in the movement for a separate state as a schoolkid. After his post-graduation in the university, founded by educationist Rabindranath Tagore, the once-firebrand rebel is now a senior officer in the Indian government. Such anecdotes are galore.
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| Photo by Rajarshi Biswas |
Visva-Bharati, declared a central university in 1951, 10 years after Tagore breathed his last, has groomed students from different sections of the society for decades to live up to the poet's dream. Unlike universities in the state, Visva-Bharati and other central universities in India are directly monitored by the Union government, and more importantly fees are quite low compared to private ones. When we studied, the hostel fee was Rs 18 per month and tuition fees Rs 15. The kitchen charges for food — lunch and dinner — were around Rs 400 per month. Before the year-end exams, we used to queue up to pay around Rs 700 in all, including exam fees.
Why am i writing this? At a time when there's a clamour on the social media, and in some mainstream media too, in the past few days about raising fees in government universities, i was compelled to revisit my past when a bed in a hostel in my university, Visva-Bharati, seemed worth a lakh. Not many could afford Rs 500 for a bed in a cramped mess outside the campus plus another Rs 1,000 for lunch-and-dinner dabba service every month. Of course we had students from affluent class also for whom such hostels were out of bounds as they used to ride expensive motorcycles while staying on rent at houses in Bolpur and Santiniketan and many of us had to do with second-hand ramshackled bicycles.
But we all were happy in the hostel, which accommodated around 300 students, including PhD research scholars. Now, we are talking about doing away with subsidies in higher education — something that successive governments have infamously achieved to do with hardly any increase in budget for central universities. When i recall faces of the students, must be some hundreds, in our and other hostels, i can see the joy and mirth in them playing cricket or football or volleyball while excelling in studies and research. If we, the taxpayers, now withdraw the subsidy, we will not only send them to the dungeons of a deadly future but also will rob their courage to even pursue the dream.
Amid all these, we, the people, confer institute of eminence tag to private universities, including those yet to take off, and try to justify our stand to raise hostel fees in traditional central universities manifold, sometimes 300%. Irony cannot be better than this, perhaps.
