Dec 11

Supreme Court tightens action over ragging

Indian colleges have known the scourge of ragging for a long time. Justified on the basis of getting closer interaction between seniors and juniors, it actually gives a license to the seniors in the college to mistreat the juniors. To be clear, there is no earthly reason why a junior in a college has to obey the words of a person who is 1-3 years older than him/her and do things which the junior does not like or appreciate. It may seem harmless and fun to ask the juniors to sing songs or to propose to one another, but it is actually much more than that. It leads to people asking juniors to follow their every orders, to get them to strip and to make them uncomfortable in other ways; and most of all, it gives a license to the bad section among the seniors to misbehave as much as they want. There are numerous examples every year of people getting humiliated, of seeking to end their life, or otherwise getting distressed over the scourge of ragging.
In view of this overall scenario, the Supreme Court, some time back, had ordered the absolute abolishment of ragging, and asked the various educational institutions to do what they can to make sure that ragging does not happen. Noble ideas, but there was a backlash from educational institutions, many of them refused to admit that any ‘bad’ ragging happened in their campus, others sought to minimise the cases or pretend that the incidents was harmful fun. Well, the Supreme Court has again repeated the order and has now directed educational institutions to adopt a ‘zero tolerance’ policy.

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