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Bengal bans ragging in colleges

Zakia Maryam in Calcutta

With more and more students becoming a victim of ragging in their first day in college in West Bengal and incidents of ragging related deaths making headlines, the state government today unanimously passed the Prohibition of Ragging in Educational Institutions Bill, 2000.

West Bengal thus became the second state after Tamil Nadu to ban ragging in the state's educational institutions.

Now ragging will be liable to a fine of Rs 5000 or two years of rigorous imprisonment or both. Offenders will also have to bear the brunt of expulsions from their institutions without any scope for re-admittance.

Presenting the bill on the last day of the assembly's budget session, West Bengal Higher Secondary Education Minister, Satyasadhan Chakraborty, said the state government was keen to put a ban on what he thought was a shameful act, much earlier.

After the passage of the bill Chakraborty remarked, "No one wants to undergo ragging especially when you are new comers in the campus. This unwarranted practice has often placed the students in awful predicament and brought severe mental agony for the guardians concerned."

"This practice was rampant in the institutions even earlier, but the authorities were helpless in taking action in the absence of an appropriate legislation prohibiting ragging. We have decided to wait for the new bill's implications before making it more stringent," he added.

Congress MLA Saugata Roy hailed the smooth passage of the bill and stressed the needs to create awareness among the students.

"Legislation or no legislation, it will have no impact unless the students themselves are aware of harm caused by ragging. I think seminars should be held in schools and colleges on this issue to make our boys and girls aware," Roy said.

According to Chakraborty, it was the untimely death of an engineering student of IIT Kharagpur in 1991, who had committed suicide after failing to bear the humiliation of ragging, that necessitated the state government to curb this unethical practice in the educational institutions.

A Public Interest Litigation was filed in the Supreme Court, which then referred the case to the division bench of Calcutta high court. The HC instructed the state government to form a committee to look into the matter. The said committee submitted its findings to the state government around two months back.

"What you see as the bill today is nothing but an interim report charted by the same committee. Therefore, it has ample scopes for correction as and when the need arises," remarked Chakraborty.

The bill, which has come as a breather for thousands of students, will come into force from the first college session, beginning this summer.

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