The Hindu : New Delhi News : JNUSU raises voice against harassment of Dalit scholar

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Wednesday, Feb 20, 2008
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JNUSU raises voice against harassment of Dalit scholar

Staff Reporter

NEW DELHI: The Jawaharlal Nehru University Students’ Union has protested against the “systematic harassment and victimisation” of a woman Dalit research scholar on the campus.

The students’ union has alleged that a M. Phil./ Ph. D. student in the School of Life Sciences had to discontinue her studies at JNU due to harassment and take admission in a Ph. D. programme at IIT-Roorkee.

“The student who was a qualified scholar of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research-Junior Research Fellowship had completed three semesters in her M. Phil./Ph. D. enrolment at JNU. Since in the coursework she had the mandatory points, she opted for a direct Ph.D. But since then, she had faced numerous hurdles in her lab experiments and passing of synopsis towards confirmation in the Ph. D. programme,” claimed JNUSU president Sandeep Singh in a statement on Tuesday.

“Also, her Council of Scientific and Industrial Research fellowship remains discontinued since April 2007, which is impeding the continuation and transfer of the fellowship in her new enrolment. Even while she was barely through her first few months of research to explore her topic, her supervisors came to the conclusion that her research was not up to the mark and that she was not interested in research. We feel that such assessment of a duly qualified student at such a preliminary stage of research is unjustified,” he added.

When contacted, Shweta Saran, one of the supervisors of the student stated that the girl was a “non-performer”, a fact that was evident from her notebooks.

The Dean of the School P. K. Yadava said the problem arose due to a communication gap between the two sides.

“The student had written to me that she wanted to continue with the same lab, while her supervisors wanted her to change the lab since they were not happy with her work. She was given some experiments that she could not do. I tried to bring them to a discussion table, but nothing materialised,” Prof. Yadava said.

“If supervisors monitor the progress, it is not harassment. I tried to look into the lab journals to see whether sufficient guidance was provided to her and it was.”

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