Caste bias on campus key cause for SC/ST students’ mental health issues: survey
text_fields
Mumbai: Almost one-fourth of the SC/ST students surveyed told the SC/ST Students’ Cell of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay that they face mental health problems.
Suggesting the gravity of the situation, a 7.5 per cent of them faced “acute mental health problems and exhibited a tendency for self-harm”, according to The Indian Express.
Of the two surveys by the SC/ST Students’ Cell at IIT Bombay, the first in February collated data to understand the life of SC/ST students on campus and the problems they face. The second held in June strove to assess the mental health of reserved category students.
Out of around 2,000 SC/ST students, 388 participated in the February survey and 134 in the June survey. The findings of the two surveys are yet to be officially released by the institute.
Meanwhile, an interim report by the institute earlier this month cited ‘deteriorating academic performance’ not caste-based discrimination as the cause of suicide of a first-year student, Darshan Solanki, quite unlike his family alleged.
The findings of the survey in June showed that SC/ST students would rather hide their identities in order to escape the stigma of reservation.
“It was very significant that despite a hostile environment in IITs, 9 per cent of the students (12 students) attributed caste as a substantial reason for their mental health problems. Four students also identified professors’ casteist and discriminatory attitudes as the reason for their mental health issues,” the survey reportedly said.
It also pointed out that at IITs ‘the SC/ST students are looked down as students with fewer capabilities’, because caste appears here in the form of reservations that are considered as ‘loss of merit’.
The report said that a quarter of the SC/ST students are from ‘vernacular, rural and humble socio-economic family backgrounds’.
The first survey found “caste functions very differently in different spaces and articulates itself in different ways”.
Many of those surveyed reportedly pointed at “fluency in English is one of the criteria to identify your caste”.
At last 23.5 percent of those surveyed in June needed ‘proper attention’ from the institution, providing them with mental health assistance.