It’s a telling reminder of the socio-economic backwardness of 21st century India. Despite cracking the two-tier IIT-JEE Main and Advanced exams — widely regarded as the world’s most competitive test — and being admitted into one of the country’s 16 elite IITs, Raju (18) and Brijesh Saroj (19), the sons of a daily wage earner in Rehua Lalganj, a village in Pratapgarh district 153 km from Lucknow, the administrative capital of Uttar Pradesh (pop. 200 million), have been obliged to jump bureaucratic hurdles and fight deep-rooted caste prejudice.
The two youth are the sons of Dharamdas, whose earnings averaging Rs.12,000 per month have to support a family of seven. In the JEE-Advanced (an exam conducted jointly by the IITs after the majority of applicants are eliminated in JEE-Main) written on May 24 by 117,238 short-listed candidates (of whom 26,456 passed), the boys — higher secondary school-leavers of the free and fully residential Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalaya (JNV), Pratapgarh — were ranked #167 and #410, and are assured admission.
Despite the obvious merit of the Pratapgarh brothers who had earlier cleared a highly competitive exam to be admitted into one of the country’s 589 JNVs established by the Central government under former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi’s New Education Policy 1986, their achievements have aroused the wrath, rather than admiration of residents of Rehua Lalganj village. The family’s modest mud hut was pelted with stones forcing the district administration to order police security. The villagers’ anger was aroused because the youths are Dalits — the lowest in the pecking order of the Hindu caste hierarchy.
Nor are these socially disadvantaged Dalit youths’ triumphs in the face of mountainous adversities appreciated by the bureaucrats in public sector banks, nationalised in 1969 to make bank loans available to the poor. Disregarding the Indian Banks Association’s guidelines for making the loans application process student-friendly, several banks declined to advance education loans to the brothers on the ground that they needed to be admitted into an IIT (which requires payment of an admission and first semester fees aggregating Rs.1 lakh) before they became eligible for education loans. After a massive media outcry, it took an intervention by Union HRD minister Smriti Irani for this semantic banking hurdle to be removed. Subsequently, UP chief minister Akhilesh Yadav has stepped forward to fund the entire IIT education of the Pratapgarh brothers.
However, educationists in Lucknow are unanimous that much more than band-aid solutions are required to create a level playing field for UP’s bottom-of-the-pyramid population of Dalits and tribals, whose number in the state is estimated at 40 million and 108,000 respectively. Admission into the Central government-run JNV, Pratapgarh where the expenditure per student is Rs.85,000 per year, was the passport to the brothers’ IIT-JEE/Advanced success. Meanwhile in UP’s 195,089 state-run dysfunctional primaries, where per student expenditure is barely Rs.9,500 per year, Dalit and tribal children suffer blatant discrimination in classrooms. They are routinely asked to clean toilets, run errands, sit apart from classmates and are served mid-day meals separately. Little wonder that 51 percent Dalit and 58 percent of tribal children drop out of school before completing class VIII.
“Primary-secondary education is the prescription for enabling children of the Dalit and tribal communities to rise out of poverty. Therefore, the UP government’s efforts should be directed towards raising teaching-learning standards in government schools instead of funding the Pratapgarh brothers,” says Dalit activist S.R. Darapuri.
Excellent advice, but wasted on politicians of the ruling Samajwadi Party whose electoral fortunes are entirely dependent upon the survival and manipulation of UP’s adamantly durable caste system. Little wonder the Pratapgarh geniuses are not without honour, save in their own village.
Puja Awasthi (Lucknow)