This is the account of an alumnus of Shah and Anchor Kuttchhi engineering college, Mumbai. We are publishing her letter to us after her attempts at redressal from the college failed to elicit any response. The college claims that its mission is
“To impart high-quality technical education to the students by providing an excellent academic environment, well-equipped laboratories and training through the motivated teachers."
This letter makes us wonder how the teachers can claim to be 'motivated' when this is the manner in which they respond to students' complaints about sexual harassment. WASH is amused and shocked to see that the college's Internal Complaints Committee (ICC) has been holding self-defence workshops for women while it has been blatantly ignoring complaints like those from the student who wrote to us. Excerpt from their website reads
As per the directives received from Women and Child Welfare Committee of Maharashtra Legislaive Asssembly. Internal Complaints Committee (ICC) of Shah and Anchor Kutchhi Engineering College organized 3-days workshop on “Self Defense for girl students” on 4 th ,5 th and 7 th January 2019.Mr. Chandravadan Gavai, from sports wing of Mumbai Police Department, trained the female students and staff members on basic self-defense techniques
and karate. This will help them to effectively handle any untoward situations both mentally as well as physically.
The workshop also included various interesting talks. Ms. Shubhangi Vaze, PSI from Govandi Police station created awareness about “Woman’s Self Defense and Crime Prevention”. Dr. Nishi Mitra from Centre for Study of Developing Societies,School of Development Studies, TISS delivered an inspiring lecture on “Catch your ‘I’, be an Eye Catcher”. Dr. Shempie Gupta educated the participants with the “Wellness talk on defense mechanism of our body”.!
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| Self Defense training programme for women at the college. Photo: College website |
The college thinks it should train the women students on how to protect their bodies from harm from outsiders while they religiously ignore complaints against teachers and students. Read the letter from the student and you will see the farce that the college is building in the name of women empowerment. We are forwarding the letter to ICC and the college administration to see if they intend to make any amends even though it is already very late.
The letter
I was a happy, cherubic teenager enthusiastic about pursuing a career in engineering. My teachers always described me as bright, intelligent and sincere. I looked forward to beginning my course in 2011 and joined Shah and Anchor Kuttchhi engineering college for the same. Little did I know that my life was going to change for the worst forever and leave me with post-traumatic stress disorder due to the things which would happen in college. From the first year, I saw boys purposely harass anyone who tried talking to me. I took it as their immaturity and let it pass but it became emboldened sexual harassment and slander later on. Second-year onwards, I heard them pass slanderous remarks about my character. I still took that as their immaturity. The ones whose advances were not accepted by me went on to become vile, every little minor failure that I had was used by them to circulate messages about me. It was too common to hear them calling me a bitch out of the blue when I objected to their slander about me. I would have been able to deal with it if the teachers were not supporting them.
Things were the worst in the 4th year. Usually, the boys passed vulgar remarks in Gujrati or Kutchhi, the language in which they spoke and I did not understand. Some girls translated it to me. In the 4th year, everyone constantly asked both my teammates who were boys to drop me as their team member. These men constantly harassed and intimidated my teammates and asked to drop me as a project partner. They said that I was not capable and had a bad character.
Most of the boys took pleasure in teaching me a lesson by ostracising me. They ensured that I did not get help from anyone. I wasn’t paying much attention to all that till the time my partners started complaining about the constant intimidation they received from the boys to drop me as a team member.
In general, there was loud sexism and insensitivity towards women in the institute. Despite that, I cleared my course with a first-class in the first attempt itself while those boys who were troubling my partners got constant drops in their years and had to repeat the course. The idea for our final year project was entirely mine because of my ability for deep research and a strong reading background. But the boys tried to instigate the teachers against me and acted sexually aggressive when confronted.
This could make any 20 year old believe that the world was unsafe for women and there was nothing one could complain about because that was how the world functioned.
The teachers would force you to be part of WhatsApp groups run by the students since instructions would be given to one student who had to pass it on to others through the WhatsApp group. A lot of violent and pornographic content would be shared on these groups by the boys on teachers, leaders and students. A request for basic decency meant being endlessly trolled virtually and in real life. The boys would warn you that they would teach you a lesson in real life and would go on sharing more of the objectionable content. If you left those groups which I did then the teacher would make your life difficult by not passing on essential instructions. The teacher who is the head of the exam section was one of them.
Right in the middle of an exam, she forced us to stop our exam and sign on a letter stating that it was our mistake that we were unaware of an important instruction and we wouldn’t blame her if our papers were not processed. This was in spite of the fact that she had shared the information on the WhatsApp group of which we were no longer members due to the constant harassment by male members. I refused to sign but she threatened to not send my exam paper to the university. This was the same teacher who was called by the lady principal to bully me to not lodge a complaint against the constant sexual harassment by the boys.
I had gone to the principal after trying to muster the courage to speak out for months. The first point I raised was that the narrow balcony where students stood to do all the office work was crowded and could lead to a stampede. The place was also very unsafe for girls and could lead to groping in future and it might have already happened. My father had accompanied me but the principal asked him to sit outside and called me in alone. This was the beginning of her attempt to bully me into silence and gaslight me. The statement with which the principal started speaking to me was “Do you think you are someone special? If others can tolerate it in silence why do you need special treatment”.
When I spoke to another principal of the college during March 2019 not only was he apathetic but also arrogant in his reply. He said that he did not care about the cases of sexual harassment in his institution and the welfare of women in general. He asked me to talk mellifluously in a nonchalant manner while I was asking him why the sexual harassment faced by me was not added in the Internal Complaints Committee. (The very purpose of my visit was to collect data on sexual harassment in STEM in connection with a research paper. I started at Shah and Anchor Kutchi because that was where I experienced it myself.) The principal claimed that the internal complaints committee registered no such cases of harassment and that meant that his institution was clean as far as sexual harassment was concerned. The same lady who was the head of the exam sections was present with the principal at that time too and was intimidating me with looks. Her insensitivity and arrogance are deplorable.
Whatsapp along with the real world was a safe place for the boys to carry out their harassment because in the real world the principal and management of the college were not interested in listening to the complaints of girls. On the contrary, they would turn them away.
Institutions have an important role in setting a normative discourse and the discourse set by this institution was that “When you go out in the real world, you will have more such problems to face so stay silent”. This was the lesson which this engineering college was giving to its girls that sexual harassment is very common and you have to bear it in silence. I remember there was a construction going on the last floor of the college where our class too was located. One of the worker’s catcalled. One teacher was passing by, I went to her and instead of helping me, she only had words to chastise me. I don’t have to mention that most of the times when the college was refurnishing in one way or the other, the ladies washroom never had a light inside.
I had complained to another principal for 2 consecutive years about a teacher who had under various excuses refused to take my journal. My father asked her in the principal’s office why it was that when I had been trying to submit my journal 3 months before the deadline she refused to accept it. Her explanation was that girls’ handwriting should be neat and beautiful. Being a girl my handwriting was not that way she wanted. It was the way boys wrote according to her. So she claimed she had a legitimate excuse to hold me back for another year: to ensure that my handwriting would improve to go to the next year of my engineering course. This was when I had scored good marks everywhere else. On one hand, I had the boys intent on derailing my career with all the mental torture due to sexual harassment and on the other hand, the teachers only complimented them.
One of the boys whom I had fairly warned multiple times to not stalk me continued digitally stalking me after college was over, passing comments on something that I had written a year after our graduation. I blocked him immediately but this shows that it is very dangerous for me to have any public profile on social media such as LinkedIn even for my professional benefits. I have to constantly stay in fear of these people.
The post-traumatic stress disorder would make me scared to step out of my house for the longest time. It was because I found the right healing groups that I have managed to be independent now. The one course in that college systematically ruined my mental, physical and emotional health for a lifetime. I continued studying something else after a gap of a year after completing the course with good grades and in the next course too I was doing well like I always did in my academics but this college and many more colleges fill the wrong ideas in students’ minds that they are lazy, slow and need to become strong in the real world by tolerating sexual harassment in silence when you go to them with serious complaints.
A severe punitive action needs to be taken against the management, staff and the accused students of such colleges by Mumbai University which is very lackadaisical about these cases.
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