How UGC's surveillance rules push women back into the dark ages

In the wake of the December 2012 reform movement, the University Grants Commission (UGC) set up a task force to recommend measures for enhancing the safety of women and gender sensitisation on university campuses. In December 2013, the committee's report was officially released by UGC chairperson, Ved Prakash, as the "Saksham" document, with the commitment that it would do all it could to encourage universities to implement the "several fundamental and far-reaching recommendations" it had come up with.

What makes the Saksham report landmark is that it examines safety of women (and men) students and employees from the perspective of guaranteeing their freedom, autonomy, and privacy. In order to do so, the Saksham report speaks out strongly against what it calls "the problem of protectionism". It emphasises that "campus safety policies should not result in securitisation, over monitoring or policing or curtailing the freedom of movement, specially for women" and warns against the infantilising of women through curfews and other discriminatory rules for hostellers.

Rather than curtailing its constituents' liberty, the Saksham report asks university administrations to put into place policies and infrastructure that would enable them to freely secure their basic constitutional rights. For example, it tasks universities to mandatorily provide counselling services by "well trained full time counsellors" and not by "regular faculty doubling up as counsellors". The report also asks for universities to ensure the regular training and gender sensitisation of its security staff, the provision of shuttle buses to enable women and men students to work late, or to just attend programmes in the evenings. A whole range of other services - from lighting on campus, the provision of women's toilets with sufficient water, student-led festivals on gender equality to the provision of hostel accommodation - are also mandated as essential.

In a stark turnaround, however, on 16 April 2015, the UGC issued another set of guidelines on "Safety of Students on and off Campuses of Higher Educational Institutions". While Saksham asks for the guarantee of women's freedom, the "surveillance" rules use escalation in wall heights, fences of spiralling barbed wire, and CCTV cameras to cage young women, to watch where they go, who they are with, and why they may be late or absent from class or the hostel. If young women still insist on staying out late, then the only permissible escorts for them are the police or one of a group of untrained "Community Service Officers". And if a shuttle bus is to offered at all, it must be only at night, and one that offers a "door-to-door pick and drop service". All that is perhaps left to be added is that all women students should tie rakhis to these escorts well in advance.

The surveillance rules also require that universities provide counselling services, but by teachers (in the prescribed ratio of twenty-five students to one teacher) rather than trained counsellors. However, there seems to be very little counselling involved, as teachers are to be trained to "act as the guardians of students at the college level". Their tasks are to report to the parents about their adult offsprings' attendance and examinations and to hostel wardens on the "personal details" and "behaviour patterns for prompt pre-emptive or corrective action". What the students, and specifically women students, will get out of such forced counselling is anyone's guess.

The UGC's volte face is not explicable through a change of guard in the MHRD - rather, it represents the momentary victory of one particular conception of what the university stands for. The surveillance rules represent a fairly dominant view of the university in relation to women students. For many administrators, it is a space premised on the exclusion of women, and where, to borrow an important idea from Phadke, Khan, and Ranade's Why Loiter, women students are inherently "unbelongers", perpetually living under the threat of sexual violence by others who also do not belong. In this conception, in order to make the university accommodate unbelonging women, the surveillance rules are necessary: by populating the university with guardians and protectors imported from women's natural habitus - the home and the family - they harness the powers of domination and control in the "best interests" of women.

But this is only true if you share UGC's premise about the nature of the university, as the surveillance rules currently do. If, on the other hand, you envisage the university, as the Saksham committee did, as a space in which power and inequality, love and sexuality, both within and without the home are subjected to critical inquiry, where democracy and reasoned arguments hold sway, then the surveillance rules have no place. The UGC can only issue rules and reports, but it is our response to them that will ensure what our universities are to be.