Every time there’s torrential weather in our country, our ‘futuristic’ infrastructure ensures some tragedy. When Delhi was getting submerged last Saturday, three UPSC aspirants, Shreya, Tanya and Naveen were fighting for each breath being drowned in the basement of a coaching centre. All their dreams and their precious lives were lost in that basement of Rau’s coaching centre. It’s hard to believe but yes, they drowned in the basement after they were trapped in there due to waterlogging.
What is worse is that it’s not a one-off. There have been numerous instances of negligence and the absence of safety protocols in coaching institutes that have cost precious lives.
In 2019, a fire in a coaching centre in Surat took the lives of 22 students. Last year, a fire broke out in a coaching centre in Mukherjee Nagar and the video of students hanging from wires and jumping from a four-storey to escape still seems haunting. Just a few days ago a UPSC aspirant was found dead, stuck to an iron gate near the Patel Nagar metro station due to electric current.
Of late, the situation of students in coaching hubs like Kota has been subject to much scrutiny with many of them taking their own lives. This makes us think are students really safe, physically and mentally, inside the huge glass facades of these coaching centres?
What makes this scenario even more frustrating is the ignorance and lack of accountability of the coaching institutes towards the safety of students. The library in which this disaster took place, was actually an illegal construction. There was no permission to build a library in the basement and it was only meant for storage purposes. The establishment was built in a sloppy place and the basement had no drainage system.
The worst part about the whole incident is that some students had already filed an FIR against these illegally constructed libraries by coaching institutes. It was filed a month before this tragic incident and no actions were taken by any authorities.
Though police have arrested the likes of this coordinator of the coaching centre and the owner building, no arrests have been made and no investigation is taking place against politicians or government officials who chose to ignore the FIR by those students, people who might even have taken bribes to ignore the situation. In the bizarre turn of events, among the ones arrested, there’s also the driver of an SUV who drove past the coaching institute and apparently ‘damaged’ the institute gate. Blame it on the driver, that sounds new.
And as usual, the political blame game has already been in motion. We will now certainly see numerous of these illegal libraries getting locked in our newspapers and on social media. Maybe there would be videos all over of bulldozers destroying some of these coaching establishments. But we all know these ‘actions’ will all pass with a whisker of wind with nobody taking up any accountability.
Thousands of aspirants leave their homes every year to come to these coaching hubs. They pay exuberant amounts of money, sometimes upwards of 2 lakh rupees, to be admitted to these coachings. This huge sum guarantees them these ‘state of the art’ facilities which can’t even ensure that they would get out of there alive.
It would be an understatement to call the living standard of these students ‘poor.’ They have to stay at shoddy establishments which charge 15 to 20 thousand on an average from each student. This is no posh location we are talking about, you can see dirt scattered all over in these localities. To live in these unhygienic areas and consume unhealthy food, one needs to spend at least 30 thousand rupees a month.
It was only in January of this year that the Ministry of Education brought some guidelines for these coaching institutes which include rules for registration, fair, reasonable tuition fee, and safety standards. Violating them will cost institutes ₹25,000 the first time and a lakh rupees the second time. The problem is these fine amounts aren’t going to affect these coaching institutes, which charge lakhs of rupees from each student. They are powerful, financially and often politically. Hundreds of students are now protesting to Delhi’s civic body and the coaching centre, demanding proper investigation and justice. But we all know the fates of student protests in our country, don’t we?
Students come to these coachings and put their faith in them to fulfil their dreams but forget preparing them for the competition, some of them don’t even get to go home alive. Who’s really responsible for these deaths? The coachings? The authorities? The people in power?
These students are already suffering and sometimes dying due to the numbing pressure of these cutthroat entrance exam competitions. The least these coaching institutes and the whole system in general can do is to ensure basic safety standards for the future of our nation, the students.