August and September are tension ridden months in West Bengal’s academic calendar because the admission lists of undergraduate colleges are finalised during this time. In 2010, 426,579 high school leavers thronged the admission offices of the state’s 354 mainstream — i.e. arts, science and commerce — undergraduate colleges. As is the case every year, with tuition fees in West Bengal’s colleges frozen for the past ten years at a mere Rs.100 per month, the number of aspirants was grossly disproportionate to the number of seats available and tempers ran high in the state’s politically volatile environment. Stoking the fire this year is the added factor of increasingly bitter, often violent, students’ union rivalry between ruling Left Front and the fast-gaining-popularity Trinamool Congress affi-liates, pro and anti-establishment respectively.
In South City College, Kolkata (estb.1879), events took a bizarre turn on September 20 when Chand Prakash Singh, a first year BA student of the college, protesting the paucity of admission forms issued by the college, doused himself in petrol and threatened immolation inside the principal’s chamber — packed with a few college students and numerous outsiders. Principal Khagendranath Adhikari addressing the media on September 24, explained admissions had closed in July when the limit of 140 seats sanctioned by the parent Calcutta University was reached. Nevertheless giving in to intense pressure, he went ahead and admitted 60 extra candidates hoping for ex post facto approval by Cal U.
Subsequently at a meeting held on September 25, the governing body of the college decided to expel Singh. According to South City College academics, Singh is a Left Front-affiliated Chhatra Bloc activist and was pressing Adhikari to admit unqualified Chhatra Bloc members. Nevertheless this dramatic incident in the principal’s office, which received widespread coverage in Kolkata’s media, has served to demonstrate the massive failure of the CPM-led Left Front coalition govern-ment, which has uninterruptedly ruled West Bengal (pop.80 million) since 1977, to reform the state’s over-subsidised higher education system.
With the Left Front government discouraging private investment in education, the wide disparity between supply and demand for undergraduate college seats has become wider. Consequently under pressure from student unions backed by political parties, most college managements admit more than the number of students allowed by the parent university, pushing teaching-learning standards into a downward spiral. This prompts students to sign up with supplementary coaching classes usually run by CPM cadres who are free to charge market fees to “deliver results”. This coaching industry aided and abetted by West Bengal’s 18 state-funded universities, works as smooth as a well-oiled engine and tots up an estimated annual turn-over of over Rs.5 crore.
Therefore expulsion from South City College is not the end of the road for Chand Prakash Singh. Though at a higher price, he will find a coaching school which will enable him to acquire a BA degree from one of the state’s 18 universities. By then, the high drama of his immolation attempt will have been long forgotten.
Sujoy Gupta (Kolkata)