DoSA: Denial of Students' Agony
Disclaimer: The opinions in this article are shared by the members of The Scholars’ Avenue, and should not be taken as the absolute truth.
Devastated, broken, frustrated, and angry — we, the student community of IIT KGP, have been dealing with a flurry of emotions since the loss of one of us — Faizan Ahmed, a third-year undergraduate student. The events that unfolded in the aftermath, particularly the KGP administration’s handling of the situation, have been nothing short of appalling.
After all this, what do we write? What do we bring to the forefront that hasn’t already been brought forth? Nevertheless, this is our hopeless attempt to inspire some change in the state of affairs, or at least make the student community aware of the incorrigible and callous nature of our administration.
It may seem that it’s the current people in office that contribute to the status quo, but rather dishearteningly, this has been the case for at least the past decade. For context, please go through this article about the incident that occurred in 2017 and the open house that followed it. A student died on the way to Kolkata due to the abysmal facilities and bureaucracy at BCRTH including, but not limited to, lack of proper ambulance facilities, incompetent ambulance drivers who lost the way en route to the hospital in Kolkata and lengthy paperwork that delayed/prolonged necessary treatment. Following this, an enraged student community called upon the then Director for an open house.
The administration has, time and again, failed the student community. Every time we think the administration has reached an all-time low, they plummet even further. What’s arguably the most gut-wrenching is the glaring lack of empathy towards the grieving family from certain faculty members of the administration. It is incomprehensible how one can be shameless enough to scoff while a family that had lost their child wanted to be heard. The student representatives had to compensate for the lack of empathy and maturity of several faculty members who only agreed to meet Faizan’s family after multiple attempts and modes of contact by the student representatives, some even refusing thereafter. What’s more, is that the student representatives were also threatened with disciplinary action and a police case for repeatedly persuading the admin to perform their moral duty. Refer to the post made by the VP for more details of the meeting between the DoSA and Faizan’s family (link)
It appears the administration’s primary responsibility is to focus on the institute’s reputation instinctively, rather than dealing with the underlying problem. Students toil for a minimum of two years seeking admission to our Institute of Eminence, but the pathetic state of affairs with regard to students’ well-being makes one question their choices time and again. While numerous reasons can be thought of as the “reason” for what happened, the sad truth is that it is a culmination of several factors and there is no single person to blame.
We reached out to the Counselling Centre, IIT Kharagpur, which gave us an idea of its inner workings and shortcomings. While the former is most definitely an article of its own (coming soon), here are the shortcomings as highlighted by a counsellor at the Counselling Centre:
- For a campus that houses over 15,000 students, there are no more than 8 severely overburdened counsellors. Although the number of counsellors increased in 2017, as promised in the open house then, the bureaucracy entailed makes it a long and cumbersome process to hire a new counsellor on the institute payroll.
- The logistics of scheduling appointments and maintaining records are all done by the counsellors themselves, which significantly increases the load on the already overburdened counsellors. It would be very beneficial to have dedicated people to handle these logistics so that records are adequately maintained and the counsellors can focus on counselling.
The administration has continually demonstrated that they tend to overlook the well-being of the students until something serious happens. Take the simple example from March this year, where an open house had to be called upon for something as trivial as cancelling offline examinations.
With the incoming end-semester examinations and freshers, people are bound to get busy, and if the admin continues their apathy, we keep the door open to another tragic incident. We thus urge you to attend the Open House on the 21st of October at 8:30 PM, to stand in solidarity with Faizan, his family, and the student community as a whole and put up a united front.
