Killing stress for India's best and
brightest By Neeta Lal
NEW DELHI - "I'll come back as a ghost to
haunt my teachers," read the suicide note of a
teenaged Indian student who recently shot himself
in the head due to exam-linked stress. Another
student - 16-year-old Anita Naresh - quaffed a
bottle of pesticide in the run-up to her annual
exams. More recently, Rajneesh Mittal, 17, created
a national kerfuffle by trying to kill himself
inside an examination hall.
March is the
year's most dreaded month for Indian students:
it's exam time and the pressure to excel can be
lethal. This year, as many as 100 students have
already committed suicide - in sometimes bizarre
situations - across the sub-continent, leaving the
country, and especially its parents, wondering
whether the final deathly toll will exceed the
2006 mark when a staggering 5,857 Indian students
attempted suicide due to exam blues, according to
the National Crime Records Bureau.
Disquietingly, those who aren't pushed to
the brink still have to
grapple
with acute anxiety and depression. Some are even
led to experiment with macabre stress-busting
recipes. This year's "hot" stress relievers, for
instance, are broth made from lizard's body parts,
bread slices smeared with pain-relief ointments
and shoe polish, anti-epilepsy drugs, and the
fumes of nail polish removers.
"Some
students from the science stream are even making
their own drugs from chemicals and salts available
in their school labs," said New Delhi-based
cardiologist Dr K K Agarwal, president of the
Heart Care Foundation of India, at a recent press
conference in Delhi. Helping the students in their
quest for such life-threatening stress-busters,
says the doctor, are websites which give them a
step-by-step recipes for the concoctions.
According to clinical psychologist Dr
Vedahi Bharati, there's an urgent need for cyber
laws which can vet these web portals. The expert
also proposes laws for parents, children, chemists
and pharmaceutical companies to stop the casual
buying and selling of OTC (over the counter)
stress-relieving amphetamine drugs whose sales
skyrocket during the exam period.
Exam
stress isn't a particularly new phenomenon on the
Indian academic landscape. Cases of depression and
the stray suicide case have been common for many
years. But lately, the situation has acquired a
new gravitas with newspapers and TV channels
reporting student suicides nearly every day.
What's pushing today's Indian students - a
bright generation with a global reputation for
their high intelligence quotient - to the brink?
Experts believe the problem is symptomatic of a
deeper issues; parental and peer pressure, rising
ambitions and fierce competition are brewing a
deadly cocktail for these young minds. Moreover, a
nation racing towards affluence, an economy on a
remarkable upward growth trajectory and
skyrocketing salaries are putting unprecedented
pressure on youth to succeed.
According to
Delhi-based clinical psychologist Dr Veena Deb,
"Parental expectations have also risen enormously
over the years which is propelling these kids to
breaking point." Deb feels that the changing
dynamics of the Indian family - particularly, the
death of the joint family system - means that
there are fewer family elders around to counsel
the young. With both parents working, and nobody
at home to turn to in a crisis, it's easier for
the youth to engage in high-risk behavior.
Unsurprisingly, around March, it's common
for student helplines, resurrected by numerous
voluntary organizations and non-governmental
organizations, to be inundated with distress
calls. "Most students feel relieved to be able to
just pick up the phone and share their fears with
someone," said a volunteer at a New Delhi-based
helpline service. "It's a great catharsis for them
and works like a salve for their frazzled minds."
The volunteer said many callers complain
about pushy parents and recounted that last week a
boy called in to ask where he could buy a pistol
to shoot his mother for nagging him too much.
Sanjeevini, an official from another
crisis intervention center, said, "An identity
crisis, uncertainty regarding getting admission to
the courses of their choice in college and a fear
of low marks sullying their reputation are usually
the main reasons for students attempting to end
their lives."
Apart from insecurity and
societal change sweeping across India, another big
reason for student distress is the modern Indian
education system. Outdated and flab-ridden, it
puts an undue emphasis on rote learning and
passing exams with a high percentage discounting
creativity and personality development.
Of
course there's no denying that in India, the
student demographic - about 70% of India's 1.1
billion population is under 30 years, a sizeable
chunk of which are students - leads to an enormous
demand-supply gap. For instance, this year, over
1.3 million students are appearing for the Class X
and XII Board exams conducted by the Central Board
of Secondary Education (CBSE) as against the 1.2
million who appeared last year.
These
gargantuan numbers will create a mad scramble for
the limited number of seats available at the
top-notch engineering, medical and business
schools that yield the most lucrative career
options. For the undergraduate B-Tech and M-Tech
programs offered through IIT-JEE (Joint Entrance
Examination), for instance, around 350,000
students will compete for 5,000 seats.
Similarly, for the blue-chip Indian
Institute of Management (IIM), from a large pool
of about 250,000 applicants, only 1,200 manage to
procure seats each year. This makes the exam even
more selective than all the top US business
schools put together. In fact the overall
acceptance rate at IIM ranges between 0.1 to 0.4%
compared with the acceptance rate of around five
to 10% in the top US schools.
Keeping this
severe crunch in mind, proponents of a better
education system have often criticized the Indian
government's frugal expenditure on education.
According to the Kothari Commission set up in
1966, which put forward the blueprint for reform
of the Indian education system, the central
expenditure on education should be a minimum of 6%
of gross domestic product (GDP). However, India's
current figure hovers around 4%, far less than
Saudi Arabia which invests 9.5% of its GDP in
education and Norway, Malaysia, France and South
Africa all of who spend in excess of 5%.
Apart from insufficient funding, many feel
the entire Indian education system needs a revamp
as it is based on an archaic template established
by the British in the 19th century. Sporadic
attempts by the Central Board of Secondary
Education to relax admission criteria and make the
exam system more student-friendly, have been
brushed aside by critics as feeble sideshows, not
really targeted at tackling the root of the
problem.
All this is a pity considering
India, the world's largest democracy, is
increasingly viewed as a strong global player due
to its exploding economic growth and enviable
human resource wealth. If Delhi refuses to do
anything about the future of India's young people
- many of whom are literally killing themselves
over academic pressure - it ought to be a matter
of national shame.
New Delhi-based
independent journalist Neeta Lal
has had her work published in over 70 publications
across 20 countries .
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