By Ashish Jaiswal:
I don’t know if the problem is with every ‘deprived’ state or if it’s specially for Bihar, but I know one thing from my past experience of studying seven odd years out of home – we have to remain separate from our family for completing our studies. And we have to remain in the competition for every exam, which is nothing less than a war on which our family’s respect and dignity are dependent. It doesn’t matter to them whether we pass or fail in the competitive exam, but society doesn’t let them live happily after we fail. They are taunted and asked, “What happened to your son/daughter? He/she was preparing for this exam for 2 long years.” People come on the result day just to taunt them. It really doesn’t matter if they taunt us, but they intentionally taunt our families, which fills my heart with frustration of failure.
The point is, the pressure on us increases as we are using more and more of our parents’ money as we’re living outside home. Every day when we talk to them, they ask us how our preparation is going. We feel like we betrayed them if our preparation isn’t going well because every question of theirs shows a ray of hope and trust on us. We have to remain away from home, handle every kind of problem on our own and then face the failure of not giving our family the result they expected. We remain away from home even in festivals like Diwali and Holi as we don’t get enough holidays to plan our journey well. Outside of Bihar, we don’t even have holidays to celebrate our one and only festival – Chhath Puja.
Why we are supposed to go outside our home state to study? Why can’t the central and state government fulfill our need of colleges and universities in our own state, even when they know we occupy more than half of the seats in every competitive exam? Why are there only a few good colleges in our own state even when we are a part of the toppers in nearly every competitive national exam?
As I end this, I am quite unsure about whether this is my experience alone or the issue of a major part of the student community. But I am quite sure that every student who lives outside their home state goes through these problems, and system has failed them.