by Swati Parashar

The calmness of a perfect summer day in Gothenburg (where I live and teach at the University) was shattered when I received the news that renowned Kashmiri journalist and activist, Shujaat Bukhari had been shot dead in Srinagar, outside his office and in the area of Lal Chowk that was his professional home. This was the most devastating piece of news from Kashmir in recent times, where death and mourning are not disruptions of the every day but normalized occurrences within which human interactions take place. It was a murder orchestrated with great precision and cowardice, bringing immense sorrow to his friends and family.

Shujaat Bukhari

Meeting Shujaat a decade ago and now writing this obituary reflects the extent to which death haunted our exchanges, literally and metaphorically. The sheer cruelty of fate that has taken away a man in the prime of his life with so much to contribute to Kashmiri society and politics! He had survived abduction, gunshots, stroke and personal tragedies to be murdered most brutally and brazenly in an area which was easily his comfort zone. Nothing makes sense in the world of violence and cruelties we inhabit.

Shujaat was a towering personality in the Kashmiri human-scape of journalists, who published fearlessly, and peace builders/activists who annoyed all stakeholders of the conflict equally. More capable commentators have already written about his journalistic achievements, so here I want to reflect on his poetic self, his kindness and generosity when I was a young, inexperienced researcher in Kashmir. I met Shujaat in 2008 when I went to Srinagar to do some fieldwork on my PhD research project. He was with The Hindu newspaper then and his office in Press Enclave in Lal Chowk was often an afternoon or evening hangout place where we discussed life and work over cups of nuon chai. He was restless then, after having miraculously escaped from that terrible incident of abduction and shooting in 2006, and perhaps poetry offered him a world of solace and meaning.

While discussing the day’s events and particularly the deaths in the Amarnath Shrine Board agitation then, Shujaat would often break into Kashmiri and Urdu poetry. I marvelled at the fact that he had a couplet (sher) or poem for all situations and contexts. He helped me with contacts, resources and always had time for the most simplistic of questions. If I annoyed him, he was too polite to show. I observed his dedicated mentorship to the junior reporters and aspiring journalists, his commitment and affection for his dear friends and the great love with which he spoke of his family, his children and his father, in particular. Writing about Shujaat in the past tense is surreal.

We stayed in touch, often through social media interactions and I closely followed his writings and activist engagements. In recent years as my own thoughts and learnings on Kashmir have crystallized, there was scope for disagreement with his views, but always within the norms of civility and decency. One of the most difficult messages we exchanged was over the death of one of his closest friends’ wife who left for her heavenly abode most unexpectedly. She had been like a sister to me during my stay in Srinagar and I was absolutely devastated. Shujaat mourned her passing and was deeply pained by the sorrow of his dear friend and the two beautiful children who had lost their mother.

I am aware that I was not the only recipient of his kindness and generosity. Several researchers who have been to the Valley have made contact with Shujaat, who always had time and resources for anyone who wanted to understand the situation in Kashmir. Many friends in social media have spoken of their encounters with him and the help he provided to them. When I learnt about his death, I told my colleagues at the University of Gothenburg that if anyone there would have wanted to ever work on the Kashmir conflict and peace processes, I would have directed them to Shujaat, who was always the first stop for researchers in Srinagar. He had friends all over the world, particularly peace and conflict researchers, activists and the wider journalistic community. It is not a surprise that almost all international media have covered his assassination, including the largest daily newspaper in Sweden, Dagens Nyheter.

If the last few years of litigation, online trolling, threats and harassment were wearing him down, he showed no signs. His smiling photos at several conferences and peace initiatives he attended, dominated his social media profile. He was targeted by people on both sides of the border. Some Indians found him pro Pakistani, while Pakistanis found him doing India’s bidding on Kashmir. Some Kashmiris may have found his views unpalatable too.

Since he annoyed all stakeholders alike, one can safely conclude that he must have been doing something right to be perceived thus. Was Shujaat aware of the risks that he took and did he anticipate such an end to his life and mission? We shall never know.

It is extremely sad to see how a person who should have been a prominent voice of reason and responsibility in the future of Kashmir has been silenced in such a brazen and well-planned manner. Obituaries will continue to be written and people will remember their association with Shujaat and the kind deeds that he performed. We also know that the mourning will last maybe a tad longer but eventually, we will all move on, till another will meet the same fate in Kashmir. Fact is, a life has been taken away because someone decided Shujaat was better dead than alive among his people and with his beautiful family and circle of friends. Shujaat is no more because we have decided to live in a dark and dangerous world where the precarity of human life is the only eternal truth, where we have normalized death and violence over empathy and life.

Swathi Parashar

As we mourn his death and also think about the political implications of these kinds of murders, we must, as conflict and peace scholars, researchers, journalists and activists, rethink ways in which we can engage our worlds to make it more livable, kinder and easier. Shujaat’s death is devastating and unacceptable but like him, we must never give up hope that there are possibilities of better worlds with norms of civility, polite conversations, generosity of spirit, empathy for the suffering and above all poetry.

During the peak of the Amarnath agitation in 2008 when a number of people had died in the protests, Shujaat would often recite the following lines from Ghalib, about his fellow Kashmiris. The words have acquired a particularly poignant meaning after Shujaat, who had defied death several times, was embraced by it so cruelly.

Qaid-e-Hayaat o Band-e-Gham,
Asl Mein Dono Ek Hain
Maut Se PehleAadmi
Gham Se Nijaat PayeKyon?

(This prison called life and the sorrow captive in it,
In reality are one and the same
Before the very end (death),
How can then one get free from it?)

(Swati Parashar is Associate Professor in Peace and Development at the School of Global Studies, Gothenburg University, Sweden.)

When an entire classroom understood the idea of how sand art can be used to explain a situation in one of the world’s most militarised zones, they joined hands and worked for few months to create a five-minute wonder than fetched them an award and lot of appreciation, reports Umar Khurshid

A still from the sand art film – Zaroorat Nahi, that depicts the Kashmir strife

In October 2017, a group of 23 students from Jamia Milia Islamia, Delhi pursuing their masters in Visual Effects and Animation course were supposed to submit a project as part of their routine curriculum. Every one of them came up with a novel idea.

Ubair Showkat, 24, a resident of Bemina Srinagar with his two other Kashmiri batch-matches Ubaid Shaffi, 23, and Nazim Hussain 23, also shared their idea.

As the three boys shared their idea with their peers, it led to literal jaw-dropping in the entire group. They wanted to portray the ongoing situation back home using the ‘sand art.’ It was instantly approved.

The group of Jamia Milia Islamia students who were behind the film – Zaroorat Nahi, that used sand art depicting the strife in Kashmir

The trio lined up other fellow students to implement their idea.  Though the idea belonged to them, all the 23 students participated in the making of this video. The group include Abida Javed, Aishya Tanver, Askhit Bharadwaj, Alyka Haiderzaidi, Armaan Khan, Atashi Saini, Debanjan Raut, Faisal Hayat, Faiza Ali, Fatima Sabih, Komal, Lakshay Sharma, Mohammad Asim, Mohammad Kamran Sherwani, Mubashir Abbas, Nazim Hussain, Rumman, Ghani, Sajid Ali, Salahuddin Ahmed, Shubankar Mehta, Sourabh Garg, Ubaid Shaffi Kana, Ubair Showkat. Every one of them contributed in making the project a success.

They created a group of sixes to report the ground reality in Kashmir. The aim of the video was to show to the audience what is actually happening on ground level in Kashmir valley. Every group had to make a 40-second video clip.

After thorough discussions and lot of brainstorming, they started to shoot the project after 15 days. It took them about half of the month to complete the shooting.

“We all took at least a month to draw the sketches on the sand,” Ubair remembers. “For that, we all shot 7,500 photographs of handmade sand arts.”

In December 2017, after the semester vacations, the work resumed. It took its own time in editing and mixing photographs.

“Throughout the making of the whole video we did not let the bias overcome any of us, we just wanted to report the actual,” says Ubair Showkat. “The whole idea was not to point fingers at anybody but to bring forth the reality in front of the large audience who are ignorant of the happenings.”

Then came the requirement of music. After a lot of discussions within the group, the music part was given to a 20-year-old NIT student, Hujat Kirmani. Kirmani shared vocals with Manan Khan, a valley based vocalist. Bringing more creative elements in their artwork they decided to bring the politico satirist poet Zareef Ahmad Zareef’s into the frame. Instead of his face, his lyrics resonate in the background of the video in his own voice.

The music video has intelligently used the voice of Khan and Zareef. Khan’s vocals talk about the pain and the crisis that is forcing the resident to pray for space where they live anonymous lives in peace and hatred. Zareef poetry gives an idea of Kashmir’s impressive past and is also a requiem for what subjugation and conflict can do to an otherwise vibrant society. He talks about how the people stand divided between different shepherds and what it costs are for a society.

As the video moves towards a close, the idea moves towards hope as Zareef talked about how all these miseries and tensions could be overcome by rediscovering life. It concludes when the Shikaras which at the start were fleeing away from the frame start returning through the gloom and crisis persists.

Zareef Ahmad Zareef

It was only after the product was ready that the group started working on naming the short-film. Finally, they agreed on Zaroorat Nahi, which means ‘not required’. Before making the artwork public, it was first shown to the course coordinator Atul Sinha and other faculty members including Professor Shaibani Azam, Dr Atul Sinha, Sony Thokchom, Saniuddin, Gazanfar Zaidi, and Rashid Ali for their review. The only addition they want to be done to the video was to add the subtitles so that it will be easy for other people to comprehend what the film-makers were so keen to show.

The project was re-opened for editing. The entire sequencing had sub-titling that made the 5.31-minute clip worth watching for the people who otherwise would not have understood it. “It changed the impact of the segment,” the students said. “There were certain words which required better translation.”

Finally, the work was submitted to the department and uploaded to the YouTube. Thousands of people watched the video and the response was impressive.

Within a couple of days, the video was nominated for the FICCI Best Animated Frames (BAF) Award under the Best Student Animated Short Film category. “Our video was selected out of around 300 animated movies, which I think was a ray of hope for all of us,” recalls Ubair. The award was then received by two students out of the 23 students, Ubair Showkat and Debanjan from Mumbai.

In a distant Kokernag village, there are twin brothers, sons of a labourer, who have more than 40 innovations to their credit. In the middle of engineering studies, which they are pursuing with a bank loan, they want handholding to mass produce some of their patented products, reports Samreena Nazir

At 24 years age, Refaz and Ishfaq, are an exact copy of each other. Each other’s mirror image, they dress alike and, given their interests, even think alike. They are the twins but rarely are the twins sharing their same appearance, style and thought process.

A macadamised road with beautifully landscaped slopes winds towards a tiny village with a hard to pronounce the name, Wandewelgam. Born and raised in this inaccessible hamlet in Kokernag belt, almost 85 km south of Srinagar, they wear the health resort’s beauty on their faces. Clear as the water they take in their thinking, the ‘creative twins are real good innovators.

A narrow cemented lane, packed with old mud houses on both sides in the village introduction. The houses fenced with vertical wooden sticks seem to be flowing with the ambience of a stream flowing alongside the lane. On the banks of this stream, is the house of young innovators. It is a traditional house with a temporary gate made of uneven wooden beams. The cracked doorstep welcomes in the dark corridor of the house where the mud brick stairs with curvy steps lead to the ‘Twin Brothers innovation Club’. A small room made of square-cut logs and tin sheets. The room is sealed with gift wraps from all sides making it opaque. A white sheet is glued on the door with the inscription ‘this is my world’ in bold letters. Every inch of the room is filled with trophies and certificates, preserving their innovations and appreciating their accomplishments. They have turned a dedicated room into a place to admire them.

When their classmates were busy enjoying childhood, the twins were lost in their ideas on the roof of their cowshed. There, they experimented with imaginations and would come out with creative innovations to surprise everyone. The inquisitive brothers, rich in ideas were awarded at Rashtrapati Bhawan in 2013. Pratibha Patil, the then President of India, and Director General of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, R A Mashelkar, awarded them after they competed in the 3-day 7th National Bi-annual competition.

The interesting twist in the story is that the twins are sons of a labourer, Ghulam Rasool Wani. For most of the time, he works as a labourer outside Kashmir and rarely visits home.

Once on Eid when he was at home, Ishfaq and Refaz sought toys to play with. Wani had not enough money to fulfil their wishes. But he did not let his sons feel disappointed. He started creating a variety of toys for his twins using mud. Sometime later, the mud toys broke and their father was not around to create new ones. This urged the twins to attempt making mud toys by themselves. They started making toys and sculptures of animals, birds – all from mud. This made them an instant sensation in the village. They were famous among their peers.

When they were in the fourth standard, they saw an earth removing vehicle (usually referred as JCB locally, after the company that manufactures it) in their village. It was a fascinating experience.

Observing the machine working for 15 minutes, they went home and decided to make a similar model at home. It took the boys 12 days to create a mini model out of clay and wood. They also inserted some springs in it. It had five gears and worked on the force. As they moved their ‘wonder’ out of their home, the 10-year olds surprised everyone. Their model was projected at their school and people from other villages too visited to see this innovation. It gave a boost to their imagination, hard work as everybody encouraged them.

Interestingly, the twin brothers had no friends. They never felt a need to befriend their classmates ever. They remained contented with each other and spent all their time in concreting their imagination. A few years later when they were lost in their own ideas, they had a chance meeting with Sabzar Ahmed Wani, an official working with the University of Kashmir’s GIAN cell. Impressed by their work, he took them along with him.

The Cell managers appreciated their ideas and work. There, they were also paid for their early innovations, with a promise of paying for their every innovation. The Cell managers guided them well. Later, they were invited to attend 15 days workshop organised by the University of Kashmir at Banihal. In the workshop, they came to know that the Cell is sending their innovations to the National Innovation Foundation. These included their Spade cum Hoe, Geometrical Pen, Easy Meat Cutter in addition to their other 12 innovations.

Soon, they got a surprise: National Innovation Foundation invited them to an All India Ignite Competition being held at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmadabad.

There, they were awarded for their innovations by Dr APJ Abdul Kalam. It was there they got their name: ‘creative twins’. Dr APJ Abdul Kalam called them with this name while presenting an award to them.

Out of the total 20221 entries received from across India, NIF shortlisted 32 entries, and finally, 23 innovations were awarded. NIF had received 160 entries from Jammu and Kashmir, and only the twin innovators Refaz and Ishfaq won the award from the state. They stood second at the all-India level in the High School category.

Later, the ‘creative twins’ were also awarded by Vigyan Prasar Department of Science and Technology in 2012. The brothers also set up Twin Brothers Innovation Club under the registration of Vigyan Prasar in 2015. This club was later declared as a member of Vigyan Prasar Network of Science clubs.

The brothers wanted to develop their Science Innovation Club into a learning centre for other children who are interested in innovations. “We wanted to encourage other students who are interested in practical sciences and innovative ideas but the government did not provide us with any funds”, rues Refaz.

Despite poverty, undeterred brothers never restricted or restrained their ideas. Even if they could not implement their every idea due to the unavailability of material that required funds, they would note down the ideas on paper. This would help them keep pace with their imagination and prevent a frustration from setting in.

Presently the brothers have encroached upon a store of the roof in their 2-level home and converted it into a small science laboratory. “We cannot ask our father for money because he had already spent a lot of resources on us out of his less earning,” says Ishfaq. “We somehow manage ourselves.”

Refaz and Ishfaq being awarded by Dr APJ Abdul Kalam.

Currently, they are pursuing B Tech in Automation Robotics and Automobile Engineering respectively at Punjab Technical University. But it is very difficult for them to pay even the huge tuition fees. “Since we are not in a position to afford the tuition fees, we took an education loan from the government to continue our studies”, Ishfaq said.

The two brothers have a patent for one of their innovations, Spade cum Hoe. It is easy to operate and has a handle to which both spade and hoe can be attached. NIF has filed a patent for this device (3171/Del/2011).

The innovator duo recently created space writing pen, which works on magnetic force. The pen costs Rs 80. Many of their ideas stand accepted and registered at the NIF, Ahmadabad. Presently the twins have 36 registered innovations.

One of the many innovations includes a foldable water bottle. The beauty of the ideas is that the size of the water bottle can be reduced by folding it based on how much water is left in the bottle.

The eager minds always keep looking around for possible solutions to things, which lead them to create new innovations. The idea of making an Apple catcher and clipper came to their minds once. They saw people struggling to bring down apples from distant branches. So they worked on the solution. Their solution consists of a rod, a cutter on its farther end, a clutch on its closer end to operate the cutter and a net below the cutter to catch the clipped fruit. When the clutch is pressed, it cuts an apple with help of scissors and the apple is collected in net.

Their other innovations include a drain cleaner, an injection breaker to safely get rid of small pieces, an egg breaker and a geometric pen also fitted with a clock, torch, pencil and compass, lighting shoes, strainer, digging machine, fruit ladder, portable gas cylinder, cylinder carrier, hand spade, board duster, apple catcher clip, generation of electricity by walking, potato trans-planting machine, saffron cultivation machine , tea leaves plucking device, double cooler system ,wind operated car fan, apple cutter with bulb arrangement, easy food serving vessel, duster cum water cleaner, beans cover removing device, Easy meat cutter, lighting pen, brick making machine, furrows making machine, modified trowel, bread clip, beans thresher machine, a handicraft device and an adjustable ink marker pen.

The twins give the credit of their hankering minds to their grandfather, whom they consider an intellectual of his time. “Whenever there used to be any problem or any issue, he would come up with a solution,” Ishfaq said. “Although he worked as a labourer people called him the Engineer then.”

The creativity didn’t restrict to Refaz and Ishfaq but was attained by their only sister, Runcy also. Getting tired of washing dishes, she too came up with an innovative dishwasher. This innovation demands less effort and provided better results.

The twins have more than 500 ideas, written in their Book of Ideas. These ideas could reduce human effort and prove beneficial for everyone, saving money and time.

The twins, however, are upset with the state government. “We did not get any support or an appreciation award from the state government so far,” Refaz said. “The state government did not even acknowledge our efforts.” They believe a lot of schemes being talked about are for the society’s creamy layer.

“We do not ask for government jobs but we want the government to provide us financial assistance so that we can give shape to our unshared ideas and also can provide employment for others,” Rafaz added.

Villagers in Syed Ali Geelani’s Duroo village donated land and resource to create a co-education institution that has a grand mix of science and faith as part of its curriculum and has more than 800 students, reports Faheem Mir

Unique Educational Institute (UEI) in Duroo, on outskirts of Sopore, is a special school in real means. Established in December 2006, with 49 students, it is now doing wonders. It has 890 students on its roll now.

Duroo, almost 65 km north of Srinagar, is part of the vast Zainageer belt that medieval Kashmir king Budshah gave name, fame and a canal that still irrigates the lush green paddy fields and the apple orchards. The school, in fact, is located in that ideal medieval setting with winsome scenery and green surroundings.

It took UEI, more than 14 years to emerge as a model school in the belt. Now, it is a Higher Secondary offering quality education from primary up to twelfth standard. School managers say the school is running more on donations of residents rather than tuition fees of the enrolled lot. “Our fees are much less in comparison to other schools,” one of the managers said. It is a co-ed facility.

On a sunny morning, a few hundred students in neat uniforms were lined up, the girls were on the right side and the boys towards the left, in the vast school lawns that double up as its main playing space. Morning assembly was a display of discipline, marked with prayers and speeches by the students. Prayers over, the students paraded to their classrooms. It was back to the routine: lower classes slightly little noisy than the higher classes, almost quite listening to every single word the teachers said.

It was in 2006-07 when the residents felt the requirement of a better school. It was sort of local movement and people donated 52 Kanals of their prime land. It was the Falah-e-Millat Trust that managed the basic spadework. As the school started taking off, the school administration would run the show as the 13-member Trust got in the background. Gradually it started impacting the outcome with administration and accountability taking a hit.

“It was on the insistence of the community that the Trust was revived and a new system was created and it is bearing fruit,” Dr Naseem Geelani, said. Son of separatist leader and a Dooru resident Syed Ali Geelani, Naseem, a SKUAST (K) teacher, is part of the upkeep mechanism of the school. “The Trust has its own chairman and other office bearers and I am just a member who is involved in the upkeep of the overall systems. I do not take and I do not need any income from this. This is purely a community initiative and a public property and is not a personal fief of anybody.”

Naseem said he is just a voluntary supervisor. “We constituted committees for purchase, constructions, academics and other things and it is smoothly working,” Naseem said. “We changed our fleet and now we have 13 buses, 11 of them, debt financed by Mahindra and Tata. The fleet will be debt free in six years.” He said the school has in place a yearly appraisal system for students, teachers and the voluntary works who put in great effort in keeping the institute running.

The infrastructure of the school envisages more than 50 rooms, nearly 30 washrooms and a playground spread over 34 kanals of the area. But Naseem said it is inadequate. “We need to put in more resource in the buildings and the laboratories,” he said.

In a year, the school collects and spends around Rs 1.5 crore. “But all the construction activity is community donated,” Naseem said. “The institute works with low fees but there is a fee fixation committee and we want to take it to the sustainable level.”

The fee structure is on the lower side and for the community, this is a big plus. But the management now says the low fees mean low income that will impact the long-term sustainability. Currently, it costs parents Rs 570 upto the eighth standard, Rs 810 upto matriculation and then Rs1300 for eleventh and twelfth classes. This is even much lower than the costs, parents pay to the family held schools in the Sopore town.

Students of Unique Educational Institute.

The low fee structure has not helped the management to improve the wage structure. It is also low: between Rs 4500 to Rs 10,000. It has more than 60 well-qualified teaching staff and 20 others in various managerial positions. The pupil-teacher ratio is 18:1.

When the school started, there was a concession for the residents; they will be charged half of the tuition and admission fees. The promise was made but not implemented. “Now it is the financial health of the school that may eventually decide on this,” Naseem said.

But the students enrolled in UEI are not from Duroo alone. They come from many other adjacent villages across Zainageer and some even from Kupwara and Bandipora. It apparently is the system of education that might be attracting the students. With English, as the medium of instruction, the school has Arabic an additional subject to secondary standard. They teach Islamic studies as a subject alongside Hindi. In addition to the Board of School Education curriculum, the UEI offers Hifz of Quran, Hadith and Tafseer-e-Quran as subjects as well.

With science as subject, English as the medium of instruction, and various faith and moral education as other subjects, UEI makes a grand mix of education. “We are seriously thinking of constructing two hostels – one each for boys and girls so that we make it a residential school,” Naseem said. “We are keen to have a centre for coaching in the competitive examinations.”

The results are not bad. Since 2009, when the school was upgraded to a secondary school, the pass percentage in matriculation is 100 per cent. Even after two more classes were added, the ranking in both the board examinations remained unchanged. In 70 per cent of the cases, Ayoub said, the UEI students get better result rankings. So far, the UEI has sent eight candidates for MBBS, three BUMS, and two to engineering colleges. This is in addition to many others who have opted for other professional courses in different fields.

“The administration is trying to introduce more streams in the higher secondary level,” the principal in charge, Auyoob Abdullah, said. “We have started a scholarship programme for the needy students in which we intend to offer free education to the deserving students.” Teachers said they send the students for interactions with the students and management of better schools in Srinagar city to pick up the best practices.

by Masood Hussain

With gloom dominating the valley, sweet surprises come from the Indian mainland. Last week’s surprises were encouraging. Two Kashmiri students were elected as leaders to two different students’ unions in Delhi – Aejaz Ahmad Rather was elected as general secretary of the Jawahar Lal Nehru University (JNU), one of India’s prestigious varsities; Aeshal Nisar, another student from South Kashmir was elected as president of the University College within the Delhi University campus.

Shehla Rashid Shora

Earlier, Sajad Subhan Rather, a Kashmiri student from Baramulla, was elected to the position of Vice President in the Aligarh Mulsim University Students’ Association. Mannan Wani, now the Hizb ul Mujahideen’s new intellectual columnist was a key player in the AMU student elections and was managing the public relations of some of the student leaders who eventually became leaders. It was months after the AMU elections that Wani disappeared only to appear on social media with the rebels. In a recent write-up, he talked about the “suffocation” in the University of Kashmir that “led to a change of mind” and he joined AMU, instead.

The trend involving Kashmiri students getting into the student activism is not so new. Shehla Rashid Shora created waves by taking a stand on many issues as a JNU student leader and is expected to join politics back home, possibly the National Conference. There are many other Kashmiri students in the diverse campuses across India who significantly contributed to the student activism and are holding positions and taking stands on issues cropping up on daily basis in Modi ruled India.

News about all these student leaders was received well by Kashmir. With the use of social media, these boys were seen as the new ‘sonrise’ on the horizons of student activism.

But what was missing in the entire chain of response and reaction was the enigmatic silence of the political class. They kept quiet, avoided any reaction even though they are used to reacting to non-issues for the sake of news-making and ensuring they are “in circulation”.

One of the key factors for their apparent indifference could be taken as the admission of their guilt. All of them, regardless of their avowed objectives and political ideation, have been part of the process that has traditionally strangulated Kashmir’s institution of student activism. They have directly contributed to the literal conversion of the centres of higher education into a sort of primary schools under the garb of ‘apolitical’ academics.

In the University of Kashmir that is now trying to become a new artery of knowledge through its chain of campuses between South and North Kashmir and more recently in Ladakh, one set of managers are merely surviving at high positions by claiming the credit for preventing “crises” that students were “so desperate to create by making a union”. With their contributions in academics almost nil, this band of careerists have been selling this ‘contribution’ for a very long time. Politicians, who are otherwise very insecure, have been happily buying these tales for years.

This set of managers have taken the crises to a next level by denying research on key issues of Kashmir under their self-discovered dichotomy of being national and anti-national. While most of the universities across India are literally grabbing the Kashmir related research projects (because they publish and sell), ‘guides’ in the Kashmir campus choose only “politically correct” ideas. This consideration, albeit unwritten, is another career making practice in vogue. These ‘academics’ have even denied entry to the new intellectual class, going strictly on the pattern they earlier set in Agha Shahid Ali case. This, they are doing to protect their own lack of capacity and to ensure that as long as rot gets in, the mediocrity retains the leadership.

Aejaz Ahmad Rather

The tragedy is neither the political class nor the academic managers understand one key point: denial of student activism is restricting a society’s capacity to produce a new crop of leaders. The society is getting engineers, doctors and other professionals – in certain cases more than the demand − but what is in short supply are the leaders. The political class is obliged because they would like the “traditional” evolution of the leadership: lambardar, muqdam, sarpanch and MLA. Getting well-read people to the fold makes most of them insecure.

The academic managers like this restriction to continue because they do not want the Raj Bhawan seeking explanations from them for one or the other activities of the students. They are keen they must retire honourably with all the promotions and the gratuity with a clean APR!

In wake of the Kashmiri students making it to the front lines of the student activism outside Kashmir, both the political class and the campus managers must ponder over the fact that why are they strangulating a vital student activity? Will heavens fall if the student activists will call for respect to human beings, the solution to vexed Kashmir mess, a responsible and responsive governance structure? Who is not talking in this language? On issues like Article 35(A), differences are so blurred that one fails to locate the real difference between Syed Ali Geelani, Mirwaiz Umer Farooq, Yasin Malik, Omar Abdullah, Mehbooba Mufti and Ghulam Hassan Mir. Will corner talks on these issues in the Naseem Bagh bring India and Pakistan to war?

Every effort in reviving the culture of student activism would be a direct investment in the democratic movement. It existed in Kashmir schools before the militancy set in. All schools in private and public sector would elect a secretary every year who would be the only link between the school managers and the students. (S)he would preside over most of the cultural activities within the school, manage the debates, inter-school competitions and organise weekend get-togethers.

Those arguing for plain academics insist that there is no requirement for getting the electoral process in the campuses because they otherwise have a link – the class monitor and the class representative.

But the fact is that it is not about being representatives, it is about the process that leads to the election of a student. Teachers will bear it out that normally the class monitors are being selected on basis of the academic record of a student in a class. Class monitors are usually appointed by the teachers on basis of their merit, so is the case of the class representative.

Aeshal Nisar

But hold an election in schools across Kashmir, in two-thirds of the cases, the outcome will surprise all. Class representatives would not be returned elected because they are good in merit but lack leadership qualities. This section of the student population that is normally not feeling acknowledged within the education set up considers itself the real loser in the entire game. Once elections become part of the routine, this section will get involved with the process and possibly live with it.

The other serious issue that Kashmir is confronting is that the system lacks any communication with a huge population that is under 18 years of age. All state engagements with the population start after 18. But the under-18 age group – more than half of the population right now, makes the system react at various levels, in elections, in the law and order situations and, mostly during the unrests of 2008, 2010 and 2016.

Student activism is the only way-out to reach out to this huge population and engage them.

It is high time, the governance system in the campus take a call on this. They must permit the students to assemble, organise and become active. This will set the ball rolling for youth engagement, not the football.

In 47 days of schooling in Kashmir, classes were open for 24 days only. What it means for parents who spend hugely on education and Kashmir’s new generation that is growing up with little education, asks Umar Mukhtar

Abrar (name changed), 18, a student at senior secondary school Pulwama, leaves home early morning for tuitions, with a bag slinging on his shoulders. Soon after his tuitions are over, he heads for school. As he reaches the school gate, Abrar disappears in a small alley for a few minutes, goes behind the shop line, unzips his bag, pulls out his uniform and gets into the textbook schoolboy.

Abrar is actually evading the attention of the policemen deployed at different locations in the town. He was part of 2017 student protests. “A number of students were arrested while they were on their way to their schools and colleges. Our uniforms have become our enemies,” said Abrar. “I fear this uniform might land me in jail sometime.”  This is the main reason why he carries his uniform in the bag.

This is a major shift in fast-changing Kashmir where the school uniform, once a guarantee of safety, is emerging as a symbol of vulnerability.

On April 12, 2017, after the army and the police stormed into the state-run degree college in Pulwama to arrest some boys accused for stone pelting, student across Kashmir reacted forcing authorities to close all the educational institution for a long time.  Over two dozen students were injured that day and some of them with pellets even.

Pulwama raid was first of its kind of incident. It proved a game-changing event as it opened a new chapter in the campus unrest, a crisis still frequently recurs.

For managing the situation, authorities resorted to a slew of measures: early dates for examinations were announced, the syllabus was curtailed to offer relaxations.

But were these concessions required and does it go well with educating the new generation? It is still a debate within the academic policymakers.

But in the current academic session, it looks the thread has not been broken. In March the schools and colleges opened after the long winter break and students picked up what they had left when the winter vacations were announced: the protests. To counter this and not letting the education to be the ‘causality,’ there seems no alternative to the problem.

Authorities shut down most of the schools and colleges especially in Srinagar and South Kashmir calling it a ‘precautionary measure’ citing the reasons of law and order problem. A data with the school directorate reveals that in this session out of 47 days of active schooling, there was schooling for 24 days only.

This new phenomenon is something, which different people deconstruct with their own perspectives. There is a divide on this as well. Some people see it as ‘student activism’. A few call it ‘sheer madness.’

Student activism

Students taking part in the protests, though new to Kashmir, at least in last 30 years, is a global phenomenon. Invariably this leads to some changes.

But in Kashmir, student activism was never permitted. Probably this could be a factor that results in frequent protests. The campus unrest could be the outcome of chocking the activism space in the institutions.

Mehraj ud din, a student activist and scholar at the University of Kashmir calls it as liberation – a psychological liberation that is manifested on the roads. “Our space was chocked we were not able to speak our hearts out. This is always bound to happen when you try to suppress the voices.”

Many people think that choking of space for basic activism in campuses is a key factor in pushing individuals to pickup arms.

Kashmir University Students Union (KUSU) – a student’s body was formed in 2006, the only platform where students used to deliberate upon different issues through their activism. But in 2009 the body was banned and curtains fell on their activism.

Earlier in 1990, Islamic student’s league (ISL) was seen where students participated and did some activism but when the militancy broke out, it took a backseat. It became part of one side of Kashmir’s active ideological fault line and took a political stand.

But Mehraj voices his concern on the way students protest. Protesting against irregularities and against muzzling the dissent is fine but not at the cost of education. He blames teachers for such unsystematic uprising and terms it as ‘the failure of the teacher community.’

“When did you hear Kashmir University Teachers Association (KUTA) had come forward to protest and had taken a stand against something,” Mehraj questions. “Had the teacher community done so, they could have a moral high ground in convincing the student to get back to the classroom.”

In absence of formal student’s union body in the university and the colleges, space is open to being exploited by anybody. There are groups and sub-groups, which come to streets for something and have a different motive. Properly elected student bodies will inculcate the spirit of leadership, democracy and responsibility. Why are top politicians so keen to go and address the student body conventions in JNU and AMU?

Concerns

Nazir Ahmad, a senior lecturer, sees students taking part in protests as a positive change. But he is unhappy with the pattern – bunking of classes and coming on the roads and making it a routine.

This transformation, Nazir says, is not a reaction to many things that have accumulated over a long time and are snowballing into a crisis. “Students cannot read in the evening because they had to put off their lights to avoid any trouble. There are students in jails and many other facing trails,” Ahmad said.

Rarely reported, Kashmir periphery witnesses sort of black-out, mostly in villages. If the light is put on late in the night, it can lead to a knock by either of the two forces – the militants and the troops, who could be moving around. There have been very unpleasant events in the past, including one in which a boy, preparing for his examinations, was killed. Such situations, however, are not prevalent in the universities or in the main city and major towns.

A study Education and Unrest in Kashmir: The Way Forward by a Non-Governmental Organization (NGO), states that if the present scheme of things continue in the education sector amidst 2016 kind of unrest – closing of educational institutions citing law and order problems, the risk of extremism, wide-scale criminalization of youth, chronic unemployment, drug abuse, and psychological disorders as witnessed in other protracted conflicts around the world will engulf Kashmir.

The study also points out that majority of the students are in favour of the shutdowns and protests despite knowing that it would have a negative influence on their education. Only 25 percent students were against this. Their support for protest strikes stems from their political beliefs and the lack of belief in the education system, the report said.

Khursheed Ahmad, an assistant professor says that if this situation will not be addressed Kashmir should be ready to have an arrogant, education less and fragile community of youth. “We cannot let the political problems take a toll on education and no sensible society will allow that,” He said. “We have to balance it somehow.”

The only positive that we could induce to our system was community schooling earlier in 2016 when the curfew was imposed for consecutive 53 days and then in 2017 when student uprising took place. Reportedly, some NGO’s want to establish such schools in those parts where such circumstances prevail.

Meanwhile the education department in Kashmir claim of devising an academic calendar to balance any loss of academic activities due to law-and-order problems and other unforeseen circumstances this year. But on the ground, the old mechanism seems to be in place.

Nobody seems to be bothered about the material costs it entails. No school has ever offered any kind of concession to the parents for the day’s schools were locked. They say they have to pay the staff. And they even charged the transport costs. Reason: we have to pay the banks because the availability of transport is linked to the admissions!

In the entire game, the population is facing on two counts. They spend what they are supposed to: almost Rs 2000 crore a year. Still, they are unable to have their wards educated, properly. Is it going to trigger a new trend of sending kids outside Kashmir?

by Muhammad Qasim Shah

Al-Razi statute in UN Scholar’s Pavillion

Man is born free and has been given a free will but most often gets lost. Circumstances influence his observational skills, environment conditions impact his mental faculties, superstitions challenge his rationality and free enquiry, and thus he breaks down under his own obstacles and gets displaced to the level lowest of the low. He was given an authority next to God on earth and all other creations were made subservient to him, but he reduced to make himself the servant of everything in the universe.

“For ancient man, nature was not just a treasure trowel of natural resources, but a goddess, Mother Earth,” British historian and philosopher Arnold J Toynbee wrote. “And the vegetation that sprang from the earth, the animals that roamed the earth’s surface, and the minerals hiding in the earth’s bowels, all partook of nature’s divinity, so did all natural phenomena——– springs and rivers and the sea; mountains; earthquakes; and lightning and thunder. Such was the original religion of all mankind.”

It is why we see in the circumstances when polytheism had placed an insurmountable barrier in his path of unveiling the truth, the Great Prophets came to rescue him.

“In this way, we showed Ibrahim Our Kingdom of the heavens and the earth so that he might have certainty in faith. When night descended on him, he saw star, he said, ‘This is my Lord!’ Then when it set, he said, ‘I do not love things that set’. When he saw the moon rise and spread its light, he said, this is my Lord. But when it also set, he said, “If my lord does not guide me, I will be one of the misguided people.” Then when he saw the sun shining, he said, ‘This is my Lord! This is the greatest of all!’ Then when it set he said, ‘My people, I disown all that you worship besides God. I have set my face with single-minded devotion, towards Him who has created the heavens and the earth, and I am not of the polytheists.” (Al-Quran 6:75-79)

Mythology was challenged openly. The rational argument startled and dumbfounded the false god and his followers. The Quran extensively dwells upon this debate:

“Have you not considered him (Namrud) who disputed with Ibrahim about his Lord, because Allah had given him the kingdom? When Ibrahim said: My Lord is He who gives life and causes to die, he said: I give life and cause death. Ibrahim said: so surely Allah causes the sun to rise from the east, then make it rise from the west; thus he who disbelieved was confounded, and Allah does not guide aright the unjust people.” (2: 258)

Edward Jenner, inventor of Small Pox Vaccine

Truth has always a pride to spring through the flames and rise from the blades. The Almighty Allah, who has made all this subservient to human and thus recalls us why the last and final message of Allah towards the mankind opens as: “All praise is due to Allah, the Lord of the universe.” (1:1)

You ponder, peep through, observe, experiment, question, reason, analyze and then again put it to questioning you will sum up in;

“(And) who created seven heavens in layers. You do not see in the creation of the Most Merciful any inconsistency. So return (your) vision (to the sky); do you see any breaks? Then return (your) vision twice again. (Your) vision will return to you humbled while it is fatigued.” (67: 3-4)

Whatever is held sacred is composed both of trust and of terror. When man holds the unholy as holy, he closes all doors to progress. The material objects which are considered holy, fall, on the other hand, within the sphere of human action. And whenever these things have been surrounded with an aura of holy mystery, they have assumed too exalted a status to be subjected to scientific investigation.

A case study of smallpox explains clearly the impact of the superstitions and the monotheistic revolution.

“The death of Rameses ‘V’ C, 1160 BC was thought to have been due to smallpox….. my own examination of the large photographs of the mummified body and head leads me to support this view,” C W Dixon, professor of preventive and social medicine, WHO consultant on smallpox writes in his book, Smallpox. “And the disease was known in China in the Tocheon dynasty in 1122 BC. (p 188)

In the past, this disease gripped many countries in the form of dangerous epidemics. Thousands of people were devoured by it. Even then, it took thousands of years for this dreaded disease to be investigated scientifically.

The book, The Life and Death of Smallpox by Lan Glynn, Jenifer Glynn offers some detail of its genealogy.

“In 1767 John Zephariah Holwell gave a talk to the college of physicians in London. In an address, mainly concerned with the manner of inoculating for smallpox in the East Indies, he told them that the Atherva Veda- the fourth book of ancient Hindu scriptures, written according to the Brahmins more than 3000 years ago. “Instituted a form of divine worship, with poojahs or offerings, to a female divinity stilled by the common people…… the goddess of spots…..” (see page 7-8)

It further describes: “It is true though, that for a long time, a Hindu goddess of smallpox has been worshipped with much enthusiasm throughout India and Nepal. She is known by a single name, Sitala – literally ‘the cool one’. She is believed to be both to bring smallpox and to help those suffering from it and she is represented in different forms.” (p 9 )

It is worth mentioning here that in our land Kashmir, smallpox is known as shaetal, maybe the name derived from the same Hindu goddess ‘Sitala’.

“Smallpox gods and goddesses have also been found in China, Japan, West Africa and Brazil.” (p 9)

It was not until the end of the ninth century, subsequent to the emergence of Islam, that this medical fact was unearthed for the first time and now we know that smallpox is a contagious disease and its attacks can be warded off. The first name which became prominent in history in this connection was that of the well-known Arab Muslim physician, Al- Razi (854-925 CE), who was born in Ray in Iran. In search of a remedy for the disease, he investigated it from the purely medical standpoint and wrote the first book on the subject, called, Al-Judri was al-Hasba. This was translated into Latin, the academic language of ancient Europe, in 1565 in Venice. It was later translated into Greek and other European Languages; thus, it spread all over the world. Its English translation, published in London in 1848, was entitled, ‘A Treatise on Smallpox and Measles.’

This book distinguished, for the first time, Smallpox from the Measles.

Muhammad Qasim Shah

Edward Jenner (1749-1823), after reading Al-Razi’s book was led to making the clinical investigation of the disease and successfully invented the vaccination for it. Now the question arises as to why such a long time elapsed between the initial discovery of the disease and the first attempts to investigate it medically with a view to finding a remedy? The reason is evident, holding that sacred which is not sacred, non-holy as holy, the devotion of creation unto the creation, the prevalence of superstitious beliefs and myths, all the ‘shirk’ leaving no space for free enquiry thus barring the astounding thinking capacity of the humans.

It was only after Islam came to the world that an intellectual revolution took off. It dispelled all types of ‘shirk’, enlightened the human mind and encouraged it to unveil the mysteries of the universe and to put in service all that has been created subservient to him.

There is a need to encourage the space for free enquiry and questioning in our academics so that the budding learners can contribute better.

Author is working in a medical field. Having a passion of reading books and is associated with the school level unique and popular competitive examination ALOHA GAT.

A young boy who grew up in the lush green paddy fields understood the enormous costs in sustaining agriculture. Finally, he devised a mechanical rice thrasher that has low weight, is safe and is efficient, reports Samreena Nazir

Apparently, it is a just a rectangular structure with a lid. But inside it has a thin circular wooden rod around which a wheel with sharp headed nails arranged in a sequential manner, moves. This is an innovation of a young man.
For a very long time, Sheikh Zubair, now 24, wanted to create a machine that could reduce manpower requirement in a thrashing of paddy. Finally, he developed a light-weight thresher that easily separates the grain from its stalk and husk. It is quite safe for use and easy to operate.

The little innovation that has been successfully tested by the inventor, however, is still not patented. Zubair says he lacks enough funds for this.

At an early age, he always scouted for collecting fragments of different things to attempt creating new tools. This had converted his courtyard into a junkyard. But he calls it his workshop.

A young innovator, Zubair hails from Muniward village in south Kashmir where almost 90 percent of the households grow paddy.

“Farming has become expensive in comparison to earlier times, and keeping in view the labour, service and time I created this thresher which demands less service and gives more effective results,” said Zubair.

His mother, Gulshana Akhter considered him an “eager kid” in comparison to his other siblings. “He always used to make a heap of things around the house and would always first disjoin the television, radio and other gadgets and then re-joined them back,” she remembers. “He always used to ask me questions about things but I had never been to school, I could hardly answer his enquiries.”

When he was in the eighth standard, Zubair remembers accompanying his father for electrical wiring of houses. “To be honest, what I do is actually my father’s inspiring side,” Zubair said.

Unfortunately, however, Zubair lost his father in a road accident in 2011 when he was 18. Sheikh Abdul Rashid, his father, was an employee in Rural Development Department.

After completing his matriculation from Hanfiya Model High School, Zubair stepped out to garnish his skills. Instead of getting admission in Secondary School, he got admitted to Master Institute of Technology for a diploma in electrical engineering. Later, he did diploma in electrician and wiring man.

With a curious brain, Zubair was always fascinated by machines. He once created a solar mobile charging device and surprised his friends.

The latest innovation for which he was awarded by the Deputy Commissioner, Islamabad on January 26, simplifies the process of threshing paddy. Traditionally, the process requires a lot of human resource who beat the paddy against the threshing drum and then small straws and chaff are separated by waving or winnowing. But Zubair’s threshing machine has a lower operating cost in comparison to traditional methods. His machine works on kerosene, solar energy and on electricity also.

Zubair is presently pursuing B Tech as a non-regular student in electronics at Universal Group of Colleges, Punjab. He has to his credit other innovations too like electrical bike and Kerosene car which are yet in process.

After his father’s death, the family earnings dried up. The loss burdened him and his other siblings and the only priority was to keep the family hearts going. So his status of being a non-regular student in an outside college, helped him manage a fabric shop at Kulgam. From there, he earns a bit and contributes to the family kitty.

“Kashmiri youth are much talented and have a knack for doing wonders but all they need is an encouraging environment and positive grooming,” Zubair said. “Even I had to go out of state to buy some required equipment because of unavailability of such material here in Kashmir.”

Zubair said the “enabling environment” is missing in Jammu and Kashmir. “No government agency came to my help,” he said. “It is only my motivation that keeps me going. But this also is a reality that while I have an innovation in hand, I have no funds to manage a patent.”

Right now, it is his elder brother Zadah Irfan who is helping him chase his dreams. Irfan serves the Rural Development Department in his father’s place.

The first major crisis that better-performing students from poor family backgrounds face is between 14 and 18 years of age when parents seek their help in improving the status of the family. A group of concerned Kashmir professionals initiated the idea of identifying these “risk” students and get them enough help that they continue their studies and the experiment is a successful success story, reports Saima Bhat

KEI scholars

For Ishfaq Ahmad, 24, a dim memory of his childhood is the pain personified. A resident of Kreeri (Baramulla), his father’s death in 2001, was the horror for the grade-II student. In fruit business, his death left the six-member family, comprising the widow and five children, into a serious crisis.

The loss of support made the life of the orphans horrible. Every day was a struggle and nightmares were a routine. Though all of them went to school, quite a few could study up to tenth class. But Ishfaq did not succumb to the pressure and the poor economics the family was struggling with.

Amid the crisis, his uncle, now 70, volunteered to be their guardian. Their mother became a caregiver. Working as a salesman at a shop in Pandach, Soura for the last 30 years where he stays permanently, the uncle managed their home.

Ishfaq continued his studies and finally realized his dream of making to Government Medical College (GMC), Srinagar. It was not an easy journey.

“There were a number of occasions when I decided to quit studies, partly because there were no jobs even for the PhD, but mainly because I couldn’t afford it,” Ishfaq admitted, now years after. He wanted to earn and give his struggling family a better living. But his mother did not allow him to quit studies. She instilled in him an absolute and uncompromising need to achieve his goal, instead. “She never allowed me to leave studies knowing that I had always topped my class. She had a hope that I could do something and her wishes came true after my name appeared in the MBBS list.”

Dr Riyaz Bashir, 5th president KEI, USA

Unlike Ishfaq, the other siblings could not manage well. His matriculate elder brother is still unemployed. The second brother is an SPO and is married. Both his sisters are homemakers, married and settled.

But one does not become a doctor by becoming part of the merit list. One has to study in the GMC and that has its costs. As the costs spiralled up, uncle’s support sounded too little. “From managing hostel fees to books, most of my time was getting lost in managing the finances,” Ishfaq said. “This time, my classmates were using to study and improve their skill set.”

Then a surprise came literally knocking his door. It was an advertisement on the notice board of the GMC that turned despair into hope. Desperate for support, he applied for the Kashmir Education Initiative (KEI) scholarship immediately. “I got the scholarship of Rs 10,000 in the first year of college under the undergraduate scholarship scheme,” Ishfaq said.

Though a respite, the scholarship would come to him, once in a year, which would not reduce his problems. So he met one of the KEI members. “He discussed my case with the panel and they approved my case as a special case,” a happy Ishfaq said. “They decided to give me Rs 5,000 monthly.”

The non-refundable KEI support allowed him to study tension free. “This is the minimum I require every month, and at times, when I have to get extra books, I call my uncle,” Ishfaq said. “But KEI has been a blessing for the last three years now. They gave me a laptop as well.”

Initiated in 2007 by Non-Resident Kashmiris (NRKs) in Boston with seven scholars, KEI philosophy is just a triangle: scholarships, capacity building and mentorship. Slightly more than a decade later, they are part of 7000 stories of knowledge and enlightenment. It is currently headed by Dr Riyaz Bashir, an interventional cardiologist in the USA and a professor of medicine at Temple University in Philadelphia. KEI, he says, wants to have ‘quality education’. By quality education, he means competencies in the 21st century and not knowledge alone. “Kashmir is world’s second oldest conflict after Palestine and we have learnt so many lessons which could be helpful in other parts of the world,” says Dr Riyaz, who has joined KEI in 2013 and is its fifth president.

An annual event at Kashmir University auditorium.

But back in Kashmir, KEI needed support that could see the execution part of their programmes so another chapter was added from Kashmir, KEI-Kashmir, in 2009 by another set of volunteers of government employees and University teachers. But both the NGOs are separately registered and have different boards of directors for the conduct of their operations, says Mehraj Pandit, the president of KEI Kashmir. He says both the KEIs have a common board as well as they have signed a MoU.

“Our objectives are same to help students but the difference is we fund our initiatives from the funds that we generate locally and the US-part do their work. It is kind of dovetailing but we have our separate boards as well as accounts.” Pandit says the mission is common but they facilitate each other.

KEI picks the bright students who are at ‘risk’ and provides them with a supportive and leadership oriented education environment which helps them lead that these “a positive change in their families” and eventually in the community. “If a kid from an illiterate family gets educated, it can bring an enormous change within and outside the family,” Dr Riyaz said.

KEI picks ‘at risk’ students from the poor household at the higher secondary level. “We have got this definition from the education data in Washington DC. In Jammu and Kashmir, the out of school rate for children less than 14 is 11 per cent, in India, this rate is 20 per cent, and in Pakistan, it is 29 per cent,” Dr Riyaz said. “So in J&K, we do really well in terms of elementary and middle school. There are only four states in India that are better than J&K in elementary and middle school education. The problem starts when we start looking at higher secondary education and the same data shows the impact of poverty on school education. So if you are in the lowest quintile of household income, your education levels drop drastically.”

An interactive session among KEI scholars.

After age 14, the dropout rate goes astronomically up and that is where KEI wants to intervene, said the KEI leader. “KEI has the principle of reciprocity at its core, if you help somebody at a time of his greatest need, he is going to help others when they need him.”

KEI Strategy

Barring an office that belongs to its Kashmir chapter, KEI has no infrastructure.

“One of our scholars Insha’s two books were sold on Amazon, this is the kind of change we want to see,” Dr Riyaz said. “Imagine the impact Insha will be having on her siblings, cousins and extended families.” KEI calls its students scholars.

“We treat them as leaders. They are maintained in groups so that they develop a strong relationship with each other and we give them mentoring and money,” Dr Riyaz said. “This money is given to scholars for their education and some to their parents in order to encourage them.”

Experts believe parents get their wards out of school for help and earning somewhere between ninth and twelfth standards, which is when KEI gets in. When parents see help coming, they reverse the trend. “We want to make sure that they are encouraged to stay in the education system and they really do well,” Dr Riyaz said, explaining the system the KEI works with.

“We have 624 kids in our higher secondary programme and each year that is the number of kids who are supported in the higher secondary.”

Under scholarships, KEI adopts meritorious students from underprivileged backgrounds. It ranges from high school (after they complete their class 8th) to predoctoral. “We have kept it class 8th because the majority of students who belong to far-flung areas and are from financially unsound backgrounds, leave their studies at this stage for work,” Pandit said. “For KEI to identify a candidate for support, the kid must have above 65 per cent of marks; the annual income should be less than Rs 3 lakh.” The selectors also see the size of the family because more children mean pressure on one person to earn for all.

Every year, KEI selects around 150 students from all the 10 districts of Valley after a thorough verification based on the certificates.

After proper registration, the selected students get continuous support for four years as long as they perform well, securing 65 per cent and above in their exams. Up to the tenth standard, they get Rs 10,000, a year, and for the remaining two years, they get Rs18, 000. In a special case, they get enhanced scholarship of Rs 5000 to 6000.

Under the undergraduate scholarship programme, 15 students enrolled for MBBS, B Tech and agriculture is adopted. “We have taken only these students because the fee is too high,” Areeba, the KEI project coordinator, said. “We take students from open merit backgrounds only and follow the same criteria of income. We used to have a post-graduation scholarship programme for KU students as well but that has been stopped as there are many national scholarship schemes. We also have a pre-doctoral scholarship programme.”Other than these scholarships, KEI has a transitional year scholarship as well, which is given to the scholars after they complete their twelfth class and are preparing for professional colleges. They pay it as their coaching fees.

Two of KEI scholars were last year selected in North Carolina and another got into another US school. KEI provides them with the application fees, visa fees and whatever they need under KEI’s postgraduate programme.

Under experiential learning and capacity building, KEI organizes a certain workshop for building the capacity and enhancing the personalities of its scholars. The workshops focus on leadership, leadership skills, communication block ups (fictional writing, journalism, computers). The reason for this exercise is to improve the confidence and communication skills of these meritorious students who lack it because of their backgrounds.

KEI scholars.

The mentorship programme, which KEI calls the most important part of its offerings and first of its kind in Kashmir, scholars are chosen from the age group of 15 to 26 years. Up to fifty scholars are selected for six months from the total of 624 students, where KEI provides them mentors, who speak to them telephonically and suggest what they should do.

“We are focusing on building the competencies; we are not based on the quantitative aspects like their subjects. We are concerned about bigger things like goal settings, how to utilize time, how to learn new things. The mentor’s work is on building the confidence showing them a proper way,” Areeba said.

“Just because of a mere telephone call, someone is calling them either weekly or monthly and giving them certain guidance and they are able to learn from it. One mentor is assigned for one mentee.”

For undergraduates and postgraduates mostly, KEI board members guide these scholars. They have certain career counselling sessions as well, where the scholars are helped to choose their careers.

However, the situation in the valley led KEI to make a shift in their processes. They started a self-study portal programme where the scholars are imparted with a sense of self-study. In a period of two years, Khurshid ul Islam, a volunteer, says KEI gave a hundred laptops to 100 students, loaded with study material and then their progress was monitored.

“It is a study that will help us utilize the system in other conflict regions as well,” says Dr Riyaz.

In 2018, KEI also started a social awareness programme, under which they have invited applications from the students in the age group of 15 to 25, where they are asked to identify a social problem and then find a solution. “We had a template on our website, students filled the form, came up with their proposals,” Areeba said. “They had presentations in front of a panel. We actually want them to be the change makers of our society, where we will fund their projects and they will be able to make a change on their part in society. It was a pilot programme.”

KEI has a student’s advisory board as well where scholars are encouraged to be in decision making. “It is completely by the scholars for the scholars, no personal attachment but done by them, for them; there are a lot of things which may not go perfectly well this year but they will learn from it. We just want to empower them, so that they are able to execute what they want,” says Dr Riyaz.

Out of all these programmes, Pandit says both the groups have different sets of programmes but they facilitate each other. “For their programmes, they just fund them but the executive part is done by us.”

He adds KEI’s USA chapter finances three facilities of high school scholarships, mentorship and experiential learning and postdoctoral scholarships (in international universities and this part is need-based) while as the Kashmir chapter finances the undergraduate scholarships (professional colleges), post-graduation scholarships (for local universities) and career counselling programmes.

KEI, its members say as a non-political organisation is blind to individuals with an open governance system. They are a non-religious party. Every president has a term for three years and the governance changes every three years. The volunteers go up to the president’s level if they work aggressively.

The fund-raising is being done in Kashmir, USA, Middle East, England and Europe. “Basically we present the model to people and if they feel passionate about it, they help. This is our primary fundraising base,” said Dr Riyaz. We also do marketing and communication. We market what we do so that people know about our patrons, donors and the outcome of our efforts. We have our own internal quality controls and we have external auditors as well, and finally, we do research, to check the impact of particular interventions.”

KEI doesn’t have an FCRA account. Dr Riyaz said they transfer the money to Iqbal Memorial Trust, which helps them in delivering the funds to their scholars. In 2017, KEI managed to raise the funds close to the US $ 314000 from the USA and out of this US $168000 was spent on scholarship programmes alone.

In 2016, when schools were shut for four months, Dr Riyaz said, they were concerned about their scholars so they got 100 laptops and distributed them in a randomized fashion to half of their scholars. “We have just completed the research and we are analysing the data under the study that how self-study portal like a laptop in conflict-ridden areas can help students,” Dr Riyaz said.

Dr Riyaz believes the Diaspora in the USA and around the world have always a yearning to help people back home, particularly when the conditions get bad. Dr Riayz says the international charity watch organization has rated KEI with an A+.

Owing to the disruptive education in Kashmir, tens of thousands of students migrate out to pursue studies. But the situation back home is chasing them, there, as well. This is pushing the youth to a devil-and-deep sea situation, reports Zainab Shafiq

Khalsa Aid groups volunteering for the help of Kashmiri students in Chandigarh.

When a militant was killed in a June 2017 encounter, Aniqa Shah accompanied her classmates out of the college as authorities ordered quick premises evacuation. “The college authorities didn’t even think about our safety!” regrets Shah.

A second-year undergraduate student at Women’s College MA Road in Srinagar, Shah, 21, rushed towards her Chanapora home and was caught in stone-pelting for almost four hours. “It was a horrible experience and I was really scared.”

In a conflict-ridden Kashmir, students suffer the most. Frequent shutdowns, interrupted facilities and a threat to life have pushed many students into depression or other mental health issues.

“I get frustrated because of the situation,” Shah said. “In my course, we don’t have many books and we are dependent on the internet. When it is snapped, I feel caged. It’s traumatic and stressful. One already has too many problems and then you have to worry about your career as well.”

Mobile internet service is snapped literally on the drop of a hat. “It becomes difficult to study. And when there’s no internet I feel suffocated,” said Fatima, a first-year student of Chemical Engineering at NIT, Srinagar.

“A Kashmiri student lives his whole life in uncertainty. You never know what may happen, if the examination will be conducted or not. We have never been introduced to something new, any activities, or anything to show our talent or skills. We are asked to stick to our academics and nothing else,” lamented Fatima.

Going to school or a college is linked to what would have happened the previous day. “Class work remains suspended most of the times because of which a major portion of the syllabus is left uncovered. To compensate for the loss, most of the times we have to study by ourselves or the untaught topics are given to us as assignments,” said Sehar Iram, a final-year engineering student at IUST, Awantipora.

These are the compelling reasons why a lot of students migrate outside the valley for studies. “I believe Kashmir lacks a quality education,” Sofi Azhar Amin, a Baramulla resident who is in the final-year of Business administration at Maharashtra Institute of Technology, Pune. “When you move out, you gain more experience. You learn how to be independent. The standard is higher. There are field visits. You are taken on industrial visits. Paid internships are offered in many places. There are numerous inter-college events.”

A first-year BDS student at Institute of Dental Sciences, Kunjwan, Jammu, Zufisha Riyaz Khan from Srinagar, is of the same opinion. “The level of exposure is great. We get to learn about our strengths and skills as students. We are taught how to manage our time, and most importantly, the study doesn’t feel like a burden and isn’t about cramming anymore.”

It is this trend that was seriously compromised in the aftermath of the Lethpora car bomb in which 49 CRPF personnel were killed. In parts of North India, Kashmiri students were pushed into serious insecurity and humiliation as Hindutva brigade mounted a hate campaign.

Over 300 Kashmiri students have left their institutions in Rajasthan, Uttrakhand, Punjab, Haryana and many other places and reached home in convoys arranged by concerned NGOs and individuals in Punjab. Around 19 students studying in various colleges have been expelled. Officials said more than 21000 students from Kashmir study in North Indian educational institutions.

Students at Women College MA Road Srinagar.

Salman Shaheen Charoo has been a student and later became a teacher in Lovely Professional University (LPU), Punjab. A resident of Sopore, he did his B Tech (Civil Engineering) and a diploma in English from LPU where he eventually started teaching English. He has been living an incident-free life in Punjab for five years.

Everything had been going well, but things took a turn for the worse after the Lethpora attack. “One of my students from Uttar Pradesh was promoting violence on social media and abusing Kashmiris. Initially, I decided to ignore it, but at one point it became unbearable,” Shaheen said. He simply asked her to promote peace and not violence and have equal sympathy with all. “But the student is a CSC student with exceptionally great knowledge of Photoshop and she added, ‘What you sow, so shall you reap and this attack is an answer to your actions against Kashmiris,’ to my text and circulated it in the whole university.”

Since everybody had started talking about the text, Charoo decided to approach his HOD who asked him to wait till morning. Fearing the crowd that had gathered outside his building, he applied for leave and stayed in his apartment. The next day, he took a cab to the pro-chancellor, Rashmi Mittal’s office. “After talking to two of my teachers who told her that I would never write any such thing, she called those two students who had circulated the text. And they framed their story in such a way, that it appeared that I was at fault. She then asked me to resign.”

Shaheen put in his papers. Accompanied by his roommate Sajid Jameel, a final-year Biotechnology student at LPU, from Doda, he came home.

Sajid recounts that on their way back, some people started following them. “As soon as we reached our apartment, we locked the door and entered through the window. We even switched off the lights. After about five minutes we heard people shouting that they were going to beat us. We were really scared and locked ourselves in the washroom,” he said.

From there, the duo made various calls to Punjab Police and helpline numbers. After 45 minutes, around 30-35 police vans had gathered outside their building and the people ran away. “We then booked an Ola to Chandigarh for Rs 3700 and took a flight to Srinagar at Rs 12000 each.”

As the convoys carried frightened students from parts of North India back home, the tensions are still running high. While sections of the student who are nearing completion of their degrees are saying they will return to their campuses, those who had recently started are tense. Some of them are so frightened that they may not go back. How will they continue their studies, it is a question for the society back home and the government.

It was after the Supreme Court directed the states to ensure the safety of Kashmiri students that the Prime Minister publicly spoke saying the battle is for Kashmir and not against Kashmir; this changed the situation to some extent. Even though Omar said that hate attacks still continue but the situation has started changing. A section of the students has started thinking about going back to complete their degrees. Besides, the situation that emerged in the wake of air strikes has also pushed the hate campaign aside.

All of sudden, there is a huge race for more colleges. With additional 52 colleges announced by the governor in recent months, the number of colleges in 22 districts across the state has gone up to 147. But most of the colleges announced earlier are still operating from a few rooms which have hugely impacted the quality of education they impart, Faheem Mir reports

The signboards could be misleading but both institutions are in the same building. KL Image by Faheem Mir

March 20, 2019, was a rainy day. The students of state-run Degree College at Uri were roaming in the college corridors and trying to get some space that would shelter them. The college lacks space and limitation of classrooms keeps a lot of many out and away.

Set up in 2005, with arts and science streams, this college is one of the various ‘gains’ that politicians ensured for their politics. Still, 14 years later, it operates from six classrooms for 700 students. Even if 100 students can accommodate in one classroom, it still will have 100 to stay out.

Then the students have different subjects and different semesters. This stratification makes it all the more difficult to manage the space better.

Students say they have stopped complaining about a shortage of space. Instead, they are counting days to complete their degrees. “We have a shortage of space here and we are facing problems and are now used to it,” PathanMubashir, a fifth-semester under-grad said.

Students now prefer to enrol in Baramulla colleges. “I first went to Uri College for the admission but then moved to Baramulla,” a student Ibrar Aijaz Mir said. “I am presently staying at a college hostel in Baramulla”.

In 2011, the government sanctioned a women college in frontier Kupwara district. The flip side of the great intervention is that the college is still working from the middle school Sulkoote. With more than 700 students and only 16 teachers, this college operates from five classrooms as the middle school refused to offer to any of the other nine rooms it owns.

“There are only two washrooms for more than 800 school and college students and the staff,” a female student said. The school students alleged the interference of college effects their education.

These are just the two cases of how the colleges have failed to improve quality education. These stand reduced to degree shops.

Miles away in Tral (Pulwama), a degree college was established in 1988. Almost 31 years later, it still has only 12 classrooms for 1200 students!

“The students are surely facing problems in getting a quality education,” a college official, who wishes to stay anonymous, said. “Sometimes we take classes in the staff room or take zero periods or combine classes”.

Academics apart, the poor infrastructure impacts the co-curricular activities.

A general perception is that the government sanctions these colleges for the political gains. Government is establishing new schools and colleges, even after finance department’s disagreement on several orders, sources said.

Recently the state government announced the establishment of 52 new degree colleges across the state which increased the number of overall collegesto 147 excluding private, engineering and BEd colleges. The new 52 colleges came in two orders.

There is a demand that the government, instead of setting a new college, must improve the quality of earlier ones.

“The government teachers affiliated with RAMSA recently received their salaries after six months and what they expect by announcing new colleges. Should government do justice with the staff and the students? How about those who are studying under the open sky for years now?,” one angry person wrote on his Facebook wall.

Almost all the 22 districts got one or more colleges and Ganderbal was the only exception. With six new colleges, Jammu has now 19 state-run colleges. Udhampur, which lacks even half of Jammu population, has 19 colleges; four of them were announced recently.

Even Rajouri has now nine colleges. “There was no need of establishing new three colleges in the region,” resident Raja Waseem said. “When I joined the Islamic University at Awantipora, I felt the lack of exposure because I had not come out of Rajouri ever.” The region is home to the Baba Gulam Shah Badshah University and most of its students are from Kashmir.

In 2018, Samba had just one college for three lakh population in Vajpaypur. Two months later, it has three more, one each at Purmandal, Ramgarh and Ghagwal.

In the new list of colleges, Ladakh got two additional colleges and Kashmir region got 24. Srinagar had eight colleges and got three more for Hyderpora, Idgah and Allochibagh. One of the earlier announced colleges in Bagh-i-DilawarKhan operates from three rooms of MP higher secondary school since 2009.

With three more colleges for Anantnag, it has 11 now: Khanbal, Bijbehara, Dooru Shahabad, Kokernag, Uttersoo, VailooLarnoo, Chittisingpora, Ashmuqam, Mattan and Verinag. Dooru is barely 5km away from Varinag. The distance between Verinag and Kokernag is 22 km. Vailoo is a 40-minute walk from Kokernag. Mattan is a few minutes’ drive fromAshmuqam, Uttersoo is only 16 km from Mattan and Chattisinghpora and Ashmuqam is barely half an hour drive away. The district has more than a million population but it is still smaller than Srinagar.

The same situation rules the state. Pulwama that has now six colleges has half of them literally less than 30-minutes drive away. These are Awntipore, Pampore and Rajpora. All the colleges in Kulgamdistrict are within the 7-km radius.

The Bandipora has six colleges – Ajas, Hajin, Sumbal, Bandipora, Gurez and Tulail. Three of them Sumbal, Hajin and Ajasare a conjoined cluster, which, in itself is only 18km away from major college in Bemina.

In the twin north Kashmir Baramulla and Kupwara districts, the colleges of Dangiwacha and Hadiporaare separated by a 3 km road. Since its establishment in 2008, the Hadiporacollege, operating from the local Higher Secondary, has ‘hatched’ only one batch of graduates.

Since the degree college at Baramulla and Sopore are the oldest, well-established and have their own history, students prefer to get enrolled, there. By sanctioning four new colleges the number increased to 12: Kareeri, Dangiwacha, Bomai and Boniyar.

In Kupwara, the college at Langate and Handwara are barely a few minutes’ walk away from each other.

More colleges do not necessarily mean more education. On the literacy rate front, the details are already known. Districts having not so huge number of schools have better literacy levels. In fact,Leh and Kargil have better literacy rates than Srinagar.

The rate race for setting up new colleges is making commoners happy but the people who have enjoyed colleges say it is mere politics.

Women’s Degree College Kupwara housed in Govt Middle School Salkote Kupwara. KL Image by Faheem Mir

“Four colleges in a district are enough for the population,” a University professor said. “We must improve the infrastructure and then permit to operate.” His experience is that students who had their college education away from home are sharper. “What is the fun for the student of schooling in the same village and then graduating from there,” he asked.

The mass college network might be helping in creating a lot of graduates but these eventually result in a huge compromise in the quality of a graduate. The lack of exposure is linked to the quality of evolution of a knowledgeable person.

“College means that the students should get the all-round development,” one teacher said. “He or she must have a lot of interaction with the students coming from different social and economic backgrounds and they must have access extra-curricular activities and should have all the basics.”

What makes the entire exercise interesting is that there is a dearth in the teachings staff. Most of the students are being managed by the staffers who are hired on a seasonal basis. The question is: if the government is managing the show of the older colleges using the contractual staff, how will it manage the new number?

Right now, officials said that the state-run college at Khanabal is the biggest in numbers – it has more than 6000 students. Rather than reducing the “burden” of this college, by announcing two more colleges, adding to its infrastructure would have been economic.

But the students of Uri must be happy. They have a sister college at Boniyar, barely a 30 minutes’ drive. They hope Boniyar may have better space!

People who watched Amir Khan’s Three Idiots might not have forgotten the character named Phunsukh Wangdu. He is a living legend of Ladakh who has contributed immensely in changing the way the arid desert faces its challenges in education, agriculture and ecology. It was for his innovation of Ice Stupas that Sonam Wangchuk, the Srinagar-read engineer, bagged the prestigious Rolex Award in 2016 and a Roman Magsaysay Award in 2018. Now he is working on an alternative university that will be international in character and Himalayan in nature. During his recent visit to Srinagar, he talked about himself, his initiatives and his objectives in detail with Masood Hussain

Sonam Wangchuk (KL Image by Shuaib Wani)

KASHMIR LIFE (KL): Everybody has heard of Sonam Wangchuk but quite a few know him. How much can you reveal about your life and evolution?

SONAM WANGCHUK (SW): I was born in a small Ladakh village but I spent most of my time in Kashmir which I still remember. I studied in a Kendra Vidyalaya from the third primary to the sixth standard. Later, I got admission in NIT Srinagar and spent four years here doing my engineering. I am aware of Kashmir, know it and love it.

KL: What did you do after you became an engineer?

SW: While I was doing my engineering, I got into education and started teaching kids to bear my study expenses. Gradually, I realised how hollow our education system is, so I felt a need to improve it. I thought engineers can be around in long lines but what we really need right now is to improve the education system. The percentage of students who failed in their examinations in Ladakh was 95 per cent. I wanted to help these students. So I put my engineering on the back burner and started working for the students. What we really worked for was how to make students learn things that help them improve living standards.

As I started getting into education, I came to know that the curriculum is delinked from the environment. How life is in deserts, that there are hot summers and extremely cold winters in deserts; these basic things were missing in the curriculum. So I started working in connecting the curriculum with the life around, basic things that students could pick up. This was aimed at getting them ready for life and only after that they would be ready to contribute in different activities of life.

KL: Was your curriculum interruption from the NGO you founded, the SECMOL?

SW: SECMOL (Students Educational and Cultural Movement of Ladakh) started in the year 1988. It was the same year when I completed my engineering. During the vacations, though, I would get into education. Once I completed my degree, I started working for it. We could not change the curriculum in Ladakh but changed the books and brought those books closer to the Ladakh society. Then, we set up a special school with a different curriculum especially for those students who would fail in their tenth standard examinations. We made special programmes for them under which they learned things practically. They started picking up education while working in fields. They used solar power to get light into their classrooms. They were part of the construction of solar-heated buildings. This helped them learn quicker and faster. This is the change we brought around; otherwise, we only changed the books while keeping the curriculum intact. We did train their teachers, however.

KL: Leh is one of the most literate districts in Jammu and Kashmir and this revolution took place in the last 20 years. Apart from SECMOL who contributed to this revolution?

SW: Even before SECMOL and in addition to SECMOL, lot of people had contributed immensely to the cause of education in Ladakh. This revolution came way before the SECMOL was born. After independence, Kushak Bakula and my father, Sonam Wangyal, worked together for this cause. They went to different villages, opened many schools. It was because of them that, at one point of time, when in India, half of the children population was out of school, Ladakh had 95 per cent of its children enrolled in schools. This infrastructure and enrolment, we inherited. Our only contribution was that we linked syllabus and the books with the life in Ladakh and its culture. The quantity was always there, we only contributed to the quality of education.

KL: For the last two years, you are working on a private university. I want to know its status and ask you if your initiative would be in conflict with the campus of the Kashmir University and the cluster university that state government has already set up?

SW: This alternative university is also linked with the requirement on the ground. One reason was that for Ladakh students, the higher education was available in Jammu and Chandigarh. The other reason was that even if a university would be there, it was delinked from the challenges that these students would face in Ladakh. With these things in mind, we signed an MoU with the satellite campus of the University of Kashmir for collaboration. So the University crafted certain courses like Earth Sciences, Geology, Tourism and Geography that linked the higher education with Ladakh’s requirements and that made us happy. For us, the objective is important and not who is doing it.

Ice Stupa

Now we want that the Cluster University should also pick up certain subjects – well within its mandate – which are in tune with the requirements of the hilly Himalayan region.

As far as our idea of an Alternative University is concerned, that is completely radical which no government would touch. We also know that Ladakh lacks enough of students for three universities, not even for one. So our idea of the Alternative University is that it must be an international university for the entire range of Himalayan states between the Alps, Indies and Hindukush, from Afghanistan to Bhutan to Myanmar so that the students can join and study what is not basic and natural to them. When you have an international clientele, it hardly matters where the centre of learning is and what is its population.

KL: So what is the status? We know that the awards you got, you all contributed to this cherished initiative. You still need a lot of resources. Where from are you expected to manage that?

SW: We want to implement this project while we start and learn. To us, this is something new. We wanted to start small. In 2019, we started a small fellowship program in which 10 fellows from within and outside Ladakh were taken for a course Integrated Mountain Development for one year. While implementing this, we want to see the ups and downs, the actual requirements. As of now, it happens on a low scale, so it doesn’t cost us much. But we will scale up things in future.

We have already started some constructions. For the initial couple of years, we will be moving gradually to understand things.

Right now, we have donors to the extent of our current requirements. The government in the state and the LAHDC are very supportive and positive to what we are doing. Hill Council has already given us the land, we required. As we move ahead, I believe, people will understand us better and come forward and help.

KL: What is your contribution in managing a balance between agriculture, fragile ecology and economy of Ladakh?

SW: There is no contribution as such but we are making efforts to sanitise people about the acute scarcity of water. It is obvious because Ladakh is a desert so we anticipate more problems on the availability of water especially when the glaciers are fast melting. In the wake of this obvious climatic change, we are working with the researchers in the university to hunt for a solution to manage the climatic change impact.

Already, we are working on artificial glaciers and helping people to replicate them everywhere in the region. This is vital for better management of water. The little water that we have available during winters should not get wasted and instead needs to be frozen for early summer use when the discharge is otherwise low.

We also have to think seriously about austerity in the use of little water available in the desert so we will have to use drip irrigation systems, the most efficient ones in future.

There is already a hunt for identifying techniques and technologies that will help us to grow trees without water or with limited artificial irrigation. We want these species that suit our ecology and which can grow with whatever rains we have which is very limited – four inches (100 mm) a year, which means nothing.

There are some plants which grow in this dryness. Dry Rose, for instance, grows and survives in this climate. These roses have commercial use and they grow high on mountains without or with little water. We are studying how to plant these roses on a grand scale.

Caper (Capparis spinosa known world over as caper bush and Flinders rose) is another plant. It is essential in Pasta, Noodles and other Western dishes. It also grows without irrigation.

We are thinking on all these issues. We are also thinking that if agriculture fails how people can survive with tourism. We are thinking of how tourism has dispersal and does not restrict to a city and force the people living in villages to migrate to the urban centre. The issue is how to get the tourist to the village, instead. We are working on a Farm Stay idea envisaging the women of the village to convert their homes into a homestay station so that tourists get to know how the people work in their farms. This will help the residents to stay home, work on their fields and sell the tourists if they are into some kind of handicrafts.

This is a must. Otherwise, villages will get destroyed for lack of population and the city will die because of over-population. These issues are a priority and the Alternative University will help us find answers to all these issues.

KL: We had one shrub, the seabuckthorn, a Ladakh success story. What happened to the plant?

SW: Seabuckthorn is a wonderful initiative. There has some work been done on that but we did not do anything on that. What we want to do is to get into plants that have economical worth and ecological advantages. The plants like Dry Roses, Capers and Junipers that I am talking about, if grown in higher altitudes will help in absorbing most of the rainwater thus they will prevent floods. Indirectly, it will also help manage a gradual discharge thus preventing droughts. Seabuckthorn is great but it grows in lower altitudes. But it is a miracle plant and it has great advantages. There are various NGOs working on this plant in addition to Defence Institute of High Altitude Research (DIHAR).

KL: We already have at least two 5-star hotels in Leh. Is there a possibility of creating a separate tourist township?

SW: We need to intervene at two levels – the space and the time. Tourism in Ladakh, right now, is an activity in a patch of five square km of Leh for five summer months. On space front, we need to focus from Leh to the periphery to Zanaskar, Kargil and other places. This will improve the carrying capacity in the region. On time front, we have to talk about winter tourism and see what we can do during winters. We can make these ice stupas as a huge tourist attraction. We already have Chadder track in winters. We have many other things that can help us take tourism to a 12-months spread. In summers, for instance, we can have apricots tourism because its blossoming could attract many people. We can have autumn tourism as well.

KL: How was your Ice Stupa innovation responded by other regions having similar problems?

SW: What we need to understand is that the concept of Ice Stupa is not possible everywhere. It is possible only in the regions which are extremely cold deserts with the availability of some water and where freezing is taking place. Usually, the higher Himalayan areas from Afghanistan to Bhutan live in this climatic condition where water is available and is getting wasted during freezing winters. It has an advantage that it does not require many resources, no pumping is required, no electricity and no fuel is needed. It works purely on gravity. That is why this model is slightly attractive to people. It is on an experimental stage as of now; it has not been fully scaled up. We are realising that this can be done on a large scale.

We understand this fully that this model can help preserve water and use it at places where normally agriculture faces problems and no vegetation takes places. This initiative uses water when it is not required and conserves it for early summer – April and May when the water is quite scarce. After these two months – in July and August, the glacial melt improves the discharge and the water is available for irrigation. This initiative is only managing the bottleneck of two months for cold arid zones. But at places where there is no sub-zero temperature, it cannot be replicated.

KL: Are there any instances where the model was replicated outside Ladakh?

SW: Yes, it was implemented in Switzerland. They used this innovation for the reasons of tourism and glaciers and not for agriculture. They were very interested in this so our people flew from here and created it for them. Similarly, in Skardu (in Gilgit-Baltistan), I have heard some of our bothers got inspired by the videos and started making their own Ice Stupa, though a small one. In Sikkim, people are working on it. In Peru, we went for certain interventions and it is in progress. There is a lot of interest in it from various places.

KL: With such radical thinking in a very remote area, did it ever create any conflict with policymakers, conservative people and other stakeholders?

SW: At places where there are problems, ideas are responded positively. Necessity is the mother of invention. When we started working for the education of children, whatever negativity came in our way, we used to treat it as part of the program and moved forward. We never expected an easy way, so the hardships that came in our way did not affect us. Basically, we were mentally prepared for the criticism so it didn’t really bother us. We never expected a hassle-free movement as our objectives were huge and dear to us. We expected problems and when they came we were ready and these got settled on their own.

Sonam Wangchuk

At one point of time, people started thinking that they are working for their brands, their names. There were awards and all that. I have always maintained that these awards are a mix of good and bad things. While it helps in making things easier but at the same time, the name creates some discomfort among some people. But when you continue your work, the problems are unable to bother you, in a way, the problems get tired and leave you.

I remember an Urdu couplet that explains it all;

Nasheeman Par Nasheeman Is Kadr Tameer Karta Ja,
Bijli Girtay Girtay Aap Hie Beazaar Ho Jayay

KL: What about the Siachen glacier, the way it is melting and shrinking?

SW: It is no way good for any of the two countries fighting for it. It is a war of ego. They are fighting over a huge mound of snow that lacks utility to either of the two. On Siachen, national egos are involved. We should make Siachen a symbol of peace. That cannot be done by our governments or the armies but the people of the two countries can do it. The average expense for India to keep its army stationed on Siachen costs almost seven crore rupees per day. See the people of that belt, the children lack basic education and food but still, we spend so much. Pakistan does the same thing, though her costs are slightly less. Why are they doing all this? India says if they vacate, Pakistan will take over, and Pakistan says the same thing. They do it because of each other and there is no other reason. The people from both sides should come forward and help to make this glacier a zone of peace.

(Shefali Rafiq contributed in processing the interview)

A young boy from a modest background put in his all efforts and managed cracking NEET examination with flying colours. Now the tensions in the family are about the costs that they would require to make him a doctor, reports Aaqib Hyder

Shabir Kohli’s home at Hardu kichru, Ashmuqam. KL Image: Aaqib Hyder

On June 5, 2019, in Hardu Kichru, a nondescript village of Ashmuqam Anantnag, a three-room mud house was beaming with joy and celebrations. Reason: the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) results showed the family’s eldest son Shabir Ahmad Kohli had qualified the examination with flying colours.

Hailing from a hamlet situated literally on the top of a small mountain and in the lap of another, Shabir has become a household name in his district. Hardu Kichru village was recently connected to Ashmuqam plains by a macadamized road.

Shabir, 21, made his family and community proud by passing NEET with 559 points. Visibly shy and an introvert since his childhood, his neighbours describe him as the most humble guy in the whole village. Shabir studied in a local school located outside his home up to the fifth primary and later shifted to Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalaya (JNV) Ashmuqam for further studies. After completing his twelfth standard, Shabir straightaway sat to write the NEET examinations.

Scoring only 374 points in NEET 2018, Shabir didn’t make the cut. To be on a safer side, he decided to get enrolled for BSc in a Jammu college and prepare for next year’s NEET simultaneously. While he was yet to sit in his first-semester college examinations, NEET date-sheet was out forcing him to prepare vigorously. He restricted himself to the college hostel for several months and avoided getting enrolled in a coaching academy or a tuition centre.

“To be honest, I prepared for the examination only for five months,” Shabir said. “If it wasn’t for my friend Aabid Farooq from Srigufwara who is pursuing MBBS in ASCOMS Jammu, it wouldn’t have been possible for me to qualify. He guided me at every step.”

Shabir couldn’t be happier for achieving something he had dreamed for a long time but he knows how hard the journey lies ahead. “This is just the beginning,” admits Shabir. “I know I have to face bigger hurdles and hardships in future but I have to be strong and prepared.”

Until a few years back, the family lived in a typical thatched mud house. Then they constructed a three-room structure made of raw bricks and mud with a tin-roof next to the old one.

Shabir Kohli

Despite all odds, Shabir’s parents made sure they give education to their children. Shabir has four siblings, two brothers and two sisters. Two of them study in the local middle school while as another one is enrolled in JNV Ashmuqam. Only the eldest sister didn’t go to school as she learned to tailor at an early age to support the family. Over the years, she has made a good name in tailoring in the area and earns handsomely.

“We don’t have to only tend cows for generation after generations,” Hajira, Shabir’s mother said. “I want to see my children living a better life.”

Shabir’s father Ghulam Hassan Kohli has been a farmer his whole life and is not keeping well for the last couple of years. Despite that, he tends to the cattle and fields himself every day and toils hard just not to make his son’s studies suffer.

“We never ask Shabir to help us in the fields,” Hajira said. “Also, he doesn’t know his way around cattle and fields; he was interested only in his studies right from his childhood.”

Suddenly, the wide smile on Hajira’s face got overshadowed with waves of sorrow and concern. A few days back, a visitor at her home had told her that she will have to spend more than Rs 60,000, a year for Shabir’s 5-year MBBS degree and it has been keeping her mind occupied since then. “I don’t know how we will manage that every year but I know Allah will find a way for us,” she asserted.

Old mud house of Kohli family. KL Image: Aaqib Hyder

Hajira has been working as a cook in the local state-run school for the last 14 years. A job she had started to supplement the family finances has failed to do so even after more than a decade. Currently, she gets a meagre Rs 1000 a month for the job. “As prices of products are skyrocketing, working for Rs 1000 seems like beggar (forced labour),” she said. “Moreover, I don’t get my money at the end of every month but after every eight to nine months usually.”

Shabir had asked her mother to get him a bike as a gift if he cracks the NEET examination, but now, he is more interested in having an android phone. “He will be away from home for at least five years from now,” one of Shabir’s sisters said. “He is still using a simple phone and can’t browse the internet on it. He surely needs a better phone for studying and other purposes.”

Shabir’s dedicated pursuit of excellence is an inspiration to all but he has always looked up to his parents as an inspiration. Their hard work and strong conviction to educate their children has helped him to keep going in tough times. “My parents are my real inspiration,” Shabir asserted. “Despite weak financial conditions and other constraints at home, they never drew back their support from whatever I was doing. They are my heroes.”

A number of students who were hit by the pellets during last two unrests have faced problems in continuation of their studies. While most of them have dropped out, some of them have actually fought odds to complete the basic studies, reports Faisal Ahmed Fazeel

KL Images: Faisal ahmed Fazeel

A single-storey house stands on the banks of River Jhelum in Srinagar’s congested downtown. Inside the house, Faizan Ahmed Bhat, 14, sits desolated in a dark corner of his room. Hesitant to speak, he repeatedly gazed down the floor. It takes quite an effort to get him to talk.

“It’s not complete blindness. I can see from one eye,” Faizan lifts his head and says in a despaired voice while finally breaking his silence. Faizan is a pellet victim.

Pellets are made of lead or Iron. Irregular in shape, their rough edges cause unpredictable damage when they hit sensitive parts of the body, doctors say. Pellets are particularly destructive when they enter the eyes. The soft tissue of the retina is irreparably destroyed by the trauma of high-velocity lead pellets.

Faizan was hit by pellets, a day after the killing of a militant Zakir Musa in Tral.

Like most of the pellet victims, Faizan vividly recalls the event that forced him to quit his studies, at least for the time being. “It was May 24, and there was a valley-wide curfew. I was coming back after attending tuition classes nearby,” remembers Faizan.

By the time Faizan reached near Old HabbaKadal, located close to his home, he found the area transformed into a battleground. Young boys like him were pelting stones on paramilitary forces deployed there. In response, the CRPF was firing tear-smoke and pepper gas shells. The air was heavy with smoke. With home barely a few meters away, Faizan quickly ran into an alley he thought was safe. But he was wrong.

“I saw a police van reversing towards me. It came fast inching closer to me,” Faizan said. Before he could have reacted, a policeman sitting inside the van, stuck the barrel of his hunter gun out through the tiny holes of the caged window and fired. “He fired twice.” The first shot was badly aimed but few pellets managed to smash his eye and face. He ran in screams and blood. “Another pellet cartridge was shot quickly after the first one,” Faizan said. This one pierced the muscle of Faizan’s left shoulder. He sprinted home under “unspeakable pain” before the world went dark in front of him. He collapsed at some distance.

After the horrific night, Faizan prefers the company of dark. In his room, the lights are dim, the windows are shut and silence is preferred. His mother’s heart grieves for his changed behaviour. The pellets morphed her son into a cold and harsh person.

After the pellet injury, he took a forced long break from his classes. His dark purple school bag hasn’t been unzipped after the horrific night and finds a spot in another corner of the same room.

“It’s not complete blindness. I can see from one eye. I will continue my studies,” says Faizan.

Though the boy is determined to resume his studies, he is unaware of the struggle he may have to put in.

But Faizan is not alone. Even Ahsaan Basheer, 17, was determined to continue his studies, after he was shot with a pellet gun on July 11, 2017. The pellets tore the retina of his eye, leaving him partially blind. Some 300 pellets found landed in Ahsaan’s body and face whilst five pierced deep into his eyes. He underwent several surgeries, but three pellets are still stuck deep inside his right eye. Doctors haven’t been able to remove them as it involves high risks.

His tenth-grade examinations were due a month after the incident. But he couldn’t sit for the examinations; he lost vision and an academic year. In the following year, he resumed the studies whilst bearing the consequences.

“I’m unable to concentrate for more than ten minutes,” Ahsaan said. His books lie open, but most of the times, Ahsaan is occupied, pondering over his fate and how it transformed abruptly.

Ahsaan attends school regularly with pelleted eyes and has to occupy the first bench. He faces difficulty in concentrating on the blackboard; eventually, his eyes turn red and watery. “Whenever I’m out in the sun, my eyes burn, as if put in a fire pit because the metal deep inside gets heated up.”

However, Ahsaan sat in his examinations privately and came out with flying colours. He wishes to be a journalist in the future.

Due to the pellet injuries, the young men and primary breadwinners of families fail to earn a living, rather they become a liability for their families. Imtiyaz Ahmed, 24, shrieks over his fate. During the 2016 unrest, Imtiyaz came into the range of police action. His skull, forehead, and eyes were showered with pellets when he was marching in a protest.

He used to be a baker, and after several surgeries, doctors advised him to stay away from the smoke inflected area. He picked up construction labour as his profession which garners his family only half of the need. The metal inside his body doesn’t let him work effectively and consistently.  “On sunny days, I couldn’t judge the bricks passed towards me,” Imtiaz said. “Sometimes, it would slip my hands and fall; during such days, I prefer staying at home.” Obviously, he loses wages for the days he does not work.

To shoulder the responsibilities of Imtiyaz, his 16-year-old brother Shahzad has given up his dreams and education. These days rather than attending school, he accompanies Imtiyaz at construction sites.

A pellet cartridge holds around 500 little iron balls, according to open-source details. When they are shot, they scatter in the air and disperse in all directions, hitting anyone in the range. The pellets which resemble like ball bearings have an uncontrollable trajectory. Effects are, therefore, indiscriminate; leaving the bystanders vulnerable to the attack.

One pellet changed the life of Firdous Ahmed Kumar. Firdous was the student of ninth class when a metal ball ripped his left eye snatching his vision. “The date was July 22, 2016, the most volatile year when Burhan was killed,” Firdous remember the day with acute accuracy.

The clashes erupted outside his home in Hadipura of Baramulla. Seeing his sister move towards the gate, he ran to pull her back. In a snap, just one pellet smashed his eye, making him partially blind.

For Firdous, then a student, it was a life-changing incident. Instead of attending school, he had to spend three months in the hospital and undergo several surgeries. Firdous lives with one pellet embedded in his eye forever.

However, from ninth grade, he was promoted to tenth grade that year. But school life wasn’t the same. The reflections on whiteboard disturbed his gaze. His eyes had to rest behind the dark-tinted glasses.

Firdous appeared for his tenth standard examination in 2017 but failed to clear three of the five subjects. In 2018, he reappeared in the examination – two subjects got cleared but one remained. Finally, this year he cleared his tenth grade. “I would continue my studies whatsoever,” said Firdous, hiding his pellet-hit eye behind the yellow-tinted glasses.

In the 2016 unrest, the streets were dominated by anti-India protests and the CRPF and Police responded with a pump-action pellet gun. But participating in the protests was not the key reason for landing into the range of the pellets.

It was October 2, 2016. In the outskirts of Baramulla district, inside the gate of a single-storied house in Andergam, a 15-year-old skinny girl clad in hijab, Ulfat Hamid became a pellet victim.

Her family spent over Rs 2.5 lakhs on her treatment which included two surgeries but Ulfat’s left eye could not be saved.

Ulfat had lost her elder brother a few years ago. Her father is a labourer. It was difficult for him to meet the needs of his family of five. Ulfat along with her studies took up tailoring to share the burden of her father. She used to earn around Rs 9,000 a month. After the tragedy, she didn’t just lose her sight but also the ability to go to school and to work.

“After the blindness, I am unable to study or work. I try to study but my eyes hurt,” Ulfat said. While studying in grade 10, pellets penetrated her eye. She desired to pursue higher studies and dreamed of becoming a teacher. But the dreams won’t be fulfilled. “I get nightmares of being shot with pellets again and again. I wake up with a terrible headache.”

Bilal Ahmed Bhat, Umar Nisar Shoosha and Saqib Shakeel Dar, a trio bestie, have lost vision to pellets. The trio studied in tenth grade prior to the incident. Now it is only Umar who continues the education now. His two buddies have dropped out.

They were protesting on the streets of Sopore. Pellets rained everywhere on them. Their body, eyes, and face. The severe complication in their eyes forced them to discontinue further studies, except Umar who was admitted back in the school. Umar with embedded pellet in his eyes attended school in the next academic year and cleared his examinations in 2017.

Umar wished to pursue medical or engineering in higher classes but the metal in his eye destroyed his dreams. He resorted to studying humanities. His new dream is to pursue law. “It needs meticulous concentration to study medicine or engineering; these pellets don’t let me give my best,” Umar said. “They have ruined the dreams of my future.”

While describing the horrors of the examination hall, Umar said: “While writing the examination, I can’t focus on more than 4 to 5 questions on a stretch. I must get up from the seat to rest for a few minutes and then I attend to other questions. Out of a hundred marks, I could only attend to not more than 50 marks.”

After pellets attack the young eyes, the school-going victims face difficulty in common chores. Reading, driving and playing with their friends turns into hard labour. A more important concern is the process of studying changes ghastly. The victims have to get closer to white or blackboard in class, but most often, the board reflects the light which hurts their gaze. They have to adapt to a new position to read. The books have to be elevated towards the eye of vision. Peeping into the books for more than ten minutes causes redness and watering of the eye. The trauma of the pellet never leaves their head.

These traumatised souls are the unnoticed victims of the Kashmir conflict; their future has been darkened forever and their dreams are shattered. They are the new underdogs of Kashmir society.

(A student of Manipal University in Karnataka, Faisal Ahmed Fazeel was an intern with Kashmir Life.)

As around 160 thousand students are writing their examinations for three classes, Umar Khurshid revisits the state of education and the schooling in the last 100 days of the crisis that started with August 5, when the special status of Jammu and Kashmir was rolled back and two federally ruled Union Territories were born

Students passing a barricade erected by CRPF personnel during restrictions in Srinagar. KL Image by Bilal Bahadur

“Hania, how many times I told you not to lock yourself in the room, open the door quickly,” these are the words Jawahira, 36, of Anantnag, shouts outside her daughter’s room every day.

Every morning, after Hania, 8, finishes her breakfast, she goes back to her room and locks it from inside. Till evening, neither she comes out for food nor does she talk to anyone. “She would either watch TV or sit quietly inside her room,” Jawahira said.

Hania’s unusual behaviour began in the month of September, a month after the Home Minister Amit Shah announced abrogation of Article 370, and stripped Kashmir of its statehood. The days that followed saw Kashmiris seethe with anger in their homes. As a mark of protest all schools and businesses remain shut and the transport is off the roads. Even a normal economical activity became a bone of contention and politicized.

After a month at home, Jawahara witnessed some unusual things in Hania. “Her behaviour has completely changed; she hates anybody touching her and she even skips daily meals,” Jawahira said in voice, indicating frustration.

The family even visited a doctor and was advised to engage her in sports activities. “But my daughter doesn’t like anybody around her,” she regrets.

Jawahira believes that as schools would resume, Hania’s “anxiety” would fade away. “It’s just because Hania stopped going to school and she has to spent her 24 hours in a single room,” Jawahira, who was once heading a local private school in the town,” said.

Earlier when schools were functioning, Hania was her class’s frontline student, smart and serious. Her behaviour at home was also normal.

Gulzar Ahmed, father of Aenaam, 9, believes that his son remains constantly unwell because staying away from school deprived him of education and sports. “At school he would play many games, but at home, he feels laziness,” Ahmed, a resident of Mattan said. “Just because sitting idle at one place diseases like cold and fever often attacks my son.”

PSYCHIATRISTS SAY

Students between 5 to 20 age group formed the major footfall to the clinic of Mudasira, a Clinical Psychologist in Anantnag. “Till now, I attended five to six cases and all of them are stressed as their schooling was stopped,” said Mudasira, who heads the government-run psychiatric hospital and operates from Police Lines in Anantnag.

Students outisde an examination centre . KL Image by Bilal Bahadur

Most of the cases she attended, Mudasira said were the students who feel that they may not secure good marks and even if the annual examinations are not conducted, a precious year would be lost. “The complexities were mostly seen in tenth and twelfth standard students who were scheduled to appear in board exams this year,” Mudasira said.

Unlike the children living in villages who keep themselves busy in playing or other outdoor activities, Mudasira said urban area students are unable to cope up with the enforced idleness. “They feel empty and that anxiety leads them to behave abnormally,” she said.

Dr Mansoor, a practicing psychiatrist at the Government Medical College (GMC) Anantnag received around 30 anxiety cases – all students in last two months. “All of them were depressed because examinations were around and they were not ready,” Dr Mansoor said. “The disappointment led them into severe depression.”

The cases are unprecedented and students in the 16 to 20 age group are most affected. “I used to receive 5 to 8 patients during examination season every year, but this time the numbers have gone up,” he said.

Zubair Ahmed Pala tutioning stuents at his home in Bangi-Nowgam locality of Anantnag. Image by Umar Khurshid

Mansoor believes that any work beyond routine leads people to anxiety, however; most of the students are able to cope-up. “Some students adopt the prevailing situation at one point, but some are being affected in the long run,” he said.

CURRENT SCENARIO

After remaining away from schools for around 100 days now, students are upset as administration released the annual and semester examination date-sheets without any relaxation in the syllabus. Right now, the students of tenth and the twelfth classes are writing their examinations and the eight class students are scheduled to sit for the examination, next week.

Authorities had initiated reopening of schools within the first month of the lockdown. Despite repeated announcements, however, the schools could not open. Parents decided against sending their wards to schools because they lacked communications. “Due to restrictions and deployments on roads we fear if something happens what students like me will do,” a tenth class student, Aaliya, who lives in Lalbazar area of Srinagar said.

Inside view of an examination centre. KL Image by Bilal Bahadur

Besides, the private schools asked parents to drive their wards for special classes, an idea they initially resisted but eventually accepted.

Resumption of schools has remained a key ingredient for officials to undo the strikes, voluntary or enforced. This time, however, it failed because cell phone services were jammed. Students mostly resorted to self-study and, in certain cases started taking tuitions locally. Finally, the Jammu and Kashmir Board of School Education announced the examinations and students started appearing.

Nisha, 16, a student from south Kashmir, was one of the estimated 65,000 students who wrote her first examination paper the same day when the 27-member European Parliament delegation landed in Srinagar. A student of a government run school, Nisha said she had completed 70 per cent of her syllabus when her school closed in the first week of August.

For the remaining 30 per cent, Nisha collected notes and visited some of her nearby friends for group studies. “But self-studies won’t help much if one expects to get good marks,” Nisha said.

Post August 5, when Kashmir was locked down with virtually no contact with the outside world, students also lost their contact with each other.

“We are five friends in a class and despite living in the same district we were not in touch with each other,” Tabinda, a twelfth class student said. “I’m hopefully meeting them within few days as our examinations are going to start.”

Tabinda is sceptical about English and Mathematics paper as she lost contact with her friends helping her in studies. “Since I lost my contact with my class mates, I’m not sure whether I would appear in the examinations or not,” Tabina said in a choked voice.

FREE TUITIONS

To deal with the crisis, at a few places like Anantnag, a number of graduate and post-graduate students – who were themselves not attending their colleges or the University, started, what Kashmir knows as ‘curfew classes’ where they would teach school goers free of cost. In Kashmir, tuitions are a costly affair. In most of the well-reputed coaching centres, the parents pay huge sums in advance to avail better tuitions. Some of the coaching centres migrated out of Kashmir and set up their temporary bases in Punjab and Himachal. Most of these centres are coaching students for professional courses. There are around 60,000 students currently enrolled in these centres. Parents did pay the additional costs for boarding and lodging.

In this situation, for some of the students, the free classes came as a blessing.

Weeks after August 5, Zubair Ahmed, 23, of Bangi-Nowgam in Anantnag decided to wait for the situation to get normal. However, when he realized it was akin to 2016, when Kashmir remained paralysed for half of the year, he decided to give free tuitions. He converted part of his home as a tuition centre.

Every morning when Zubair wakes up, the first thing he does is to have a look on his timetable fixed on the inner side of his trunk lid so that he can fit his day-long schedule according to his work.  As Zubair finishes his breakfast around 8 am, the first batch of the students ‘gets in.

Zubair teaches students from primary to twelfth class in his single-storey house located few meters away from Idrah-e-Tehkekaat, a six decade old Dar-ul-Uloom seminary of the district. By 11am, the second batch enters and the process continues till 5 pm.

An elder son of Mohammad Abass, 45, a coppersmith, Zubair is a 3rd year BA Commerce student of state run Boys College of Anantnag. In 2016, Zubair started free tuitions for the first time.

Keeping in view the losses student community is suffering, Zubair began providing free tuitions to 14 students belonging to different places. In order to get familiar with the examination pattern, Zubair has also conducted various tests and trials so that students won’t find any trouble in the annual examination. “I have even prepared a handwritten question paper formatted exactly the way students get on the day of examination,” Zubair said. “It would help them to understand it better way.”

It is not only students who are worried about their studies; the anxiousness can be seen among the parents as well. Around 15 kms away from Anantnag is Salia-Naghbal. In the village, a community named Mir Mohalla requested one of the resident graduates, Shakir Ahmed 22, to teach students for free. Shakir provides free tuitions to 10 under metric students at his under construction single-storey house.

Every morning Shakir receives two batches of students, five in each group and by 1 pm he finishes their coaching. “Then I leave to look after my father’s shop and return in the evening,” Shakir said.

Shakir feels that students have lost most of their school time. “It’s ultimately students’ loss, teachers would barely lose their salary but what students would lose will never be compensated,” Shakir said.

Barely a kilometre away from Shakir’s house is Bunpora- a small hamlet consisting of around 40 households. As one enters into the Mohalla, the first thing that catches one’s attention is a three-storey impressive house on the banks of Shahkol, a rivulet emanating from Pahalgam. It belongs to Mohammad Ismail Sheikh.

Sheikh’s daughter Nighat, 27, a postgraduate in sociology, teaches eight students.

With an athlete figure and broad shoulders, Nighat was once captain of her school’s volley-ball team. But Nighat is not new to the teaching profession as well. Years back she took up a teaching job at a local private school but untimely ended up by resigning. “This year I thought I have gained some experience and I started giving tuitions,” Nighat said.

In her village, there are many tuition centres charging hefty sums. “I know the lifestyle of our village, most of the families belong to lower classes, I don’t need money from them, just their blessings,” Nighat said.

BOARD EXAMS

But every student was not fortunate enough to get tuitions, free or otherwise. By the time, their parents were thinking of doing something for their wards, the examinations were announced. Right now, around 160 thousand students are writing their examinations – 65000 students of tenth class; 48,000 students of twelfth and 47000 candidates of eleventh class.

Unlike past, insiders in the education sector said, the Board is unlikely to offer any concession to the students who spent 100 days out of school.

Gulazar Ahmed 50, of Mattan in Anantnag, said his two sons who were enrolled in the government run local school, are weakest students. Due to his financial constraints, Gulzar couldn’t send them for private education. Unlike other places, the private schools in Kashmir are considered better.

“Now three more months have added to their weakness, what would they do,” Gulzar asked. “Private schools have somehow managed to keep their students engaged by providing study materials and assignments but government schools were completely shut.”

Mushtaq Ahmed, a resident of Pampore said that his son Labeeb, a student of class 1st, has completely forgotten what he studied early this year. “I guess he has to start his basics afresh,” Mushtaq said.

Mushtaq believes that as long as kids remain in touch with books and other extracurricular activities, they remain fit and free. “Three months home stay has made my son lazy and the frustration could be easily seen on his face,” Mushtaq added.

Every time, Iqra, a fourth standard student of a government-run school in Baramulla visits her school she finds it locked. At the same time, her four friends – all enrolled in private schools, have completed their syllabus. “They have even finished annual examinations and are about to join new classes but we are at the same place,” Iqra said. Now, when her school has finally reopened, there are no students!

Iqra’s elder sister Nisha studies in eighth class. Every morning she walks two kilometres to receive tuitions at a nearby village. Nisha is among the four students of her village who receive tuitions. “In normal situation, no one among our classes would have gone for private tuitions. But now we are helpless, we can’t leave our studies midway,” Nisha said.

PRIVATE VERSUS GOVERNMENT

On October 23, as sun was about to set, a group of boys – all secondary level students, wearing green round caps walked out of the local Darsgah in Anantnag. All of them were busy discussing their school life before August 5.

Usually young children hesitate to attend classes on daily basis, but this time three month long stay has made them lazy and dull. “I don’t feel good at home, I want to join back my classes,” said one of the 9th class student, Basit Lone.

Azaan Nayeem is another student who was keen to join his new school, but since August he has been waiting to meet his new classmates. “Are you too joining my school, I’m so excited,” Azaan asked his friend Musaib, while wiping out his flowing nose.

In private schools like St Xain’s, Alserwat Convent School and Rosy Tots School in south Kashmir, students have been asked to collect the study material and prepare for the examinations. “We were told to collect the material and examinations will be conducted soon,” said Arooba, a student of seventh class at St Xain’s. “I’m now preparing for the exams starting from next few days.”

Wasif Ahmed, 16, is among the students taking private tuitions and is not aware of the school’s situation. “We were also told to study at home and the examinations would be conducted at safer places, like residential houses” Wasif said.

Given the fear in south Kashmir, after a number of schools were set afire, many schools decided against resuming work till normalcy returns. It was also decided to conduct the exams at residential houses so that student won’t meet in trouble during their exam hours.

“I don’t know where would the exams take place, but I’m sure it would not be at schools,” said another student, Owais of Rosy Tots school.

Every morning when Pervaiz Ahmed, a local private school teacher wakes up, the first thing that comes into his mind is what he will do today. Pervaiz joined a private school early this year but post August 5; when schools were shut Pervaiz was left moneyless.

A post-graduate in history, Pervaiz was earning Rs 4000, a month. “Since the school stopped paying me, I’m not able to buy books and other material I need for my further studies,” Pervaiz said. He plans to appear in a PhD entrance test this year.

A policeman helps a student to cross a concertina barricade to reach her examination centre in Srinagar. KL Image by Bilal Bahadur

Adil Ahmed, 26, is a post-graduate in sociology. He is also an unpaid teacher. Now, he looks after a Xerox shop belonging to one of his acquaintances at Khanabal Anantnag. “He pays me some amount and I am somehow managing with that money,” Adil said.

What surprises the people is that most of the parents, of students who are studying in better private schools, have cleared their dues. Tuition fees apart, the school managements have even charged the transport fee despite the fact that the school vehicles barely moved an inch since August 5. Parents see involvement of the officials in this racket.

COLLEGES, UNIVERSITIES

Like schools, the students pursuing higher studies are also unable to attend colleges and universities. The administration has directed all the higher level students to collect study material from their respective departments sans class work.

Last month, Khursheed Ahmad Ganai, the erstwhile advisor to the erstwhile Governor, directed that all ensuing university examinations should commence before the onset of winter.

“Students often come to university but no classes are being conducted. We do provide them study material to read at home,” a clerk in the University of Kashmir’s English department said.

PG students have been asked to visit the faculty if they need any assistance. “Normally, it takes two years to finish a degree but the last semester (4^th) students have already passed three years in the campus and their degree is still incomplete,” a fourth semester student, who had come to inquire about his exam said.

The loss is felt in every category. Sitting idle in her small cabin, Danishta, 27, a third year PhD student at (NIT) is infuriated as her work has come to halt due to the internet blockade. Pursuing her degree in cloud networking, Danishta on routine spends seven to eight hours at the University but ends up with doing nothing.

“My thesis starts and ends with internet, to which I lack access,” Danishta said. “I can’t even open my previous work done months ago.”

Danishta is scheduled to attend a national seminar in Mathura related to the Cloud computing. She has developed cold feet. “Attending a seminar without learning anything about it is equal to a humiliation,” Danishta said.

In October, it was not less than a miracle for Danishta when she got a call from Mathura that she would be given a chance to speak on the stage. “I would term it a golden chance but if the internet blockade continued for two more weeks, I won’t be able to join the conference,” she added.

Barely 200 meters away from NIT is University of Kashmir and varsity’s PhD scholars have the same story to tell.

Adil Ahmed is a Mass Communication scholar. Restless since August, Adil’s research needs internet. “I had already finished 70 per cent of my work but as internet services were barred, I’m not able to do anything.”

With instability and turmoil frequenting Kashmir, more than 200 thousand students at the college and university level are facing a crippling crisis as their degrees get delayed inordinately. The new norm of the Universities in Kashmir offering graduation in four years and managing masters in more than three years is deducting one to two years of precious economic life from Kashmir’s new generation in the most vibrant phase of their life, reports Aaqib Hyder

Students protests against delay of examination in March 2018. KL Image by Bilal Bahadur

When childhood friends, Waris Samad and Murtaza Hussain, passed their twelfth class examinations in 2016, they planned to go outside the state for graduation together. Hailing from Bemina area of Srinagar, they were both fed up with the inordinate delays that the University of Kashmir would normally resort to in offering graduation degrees. After a lot of convincing, Waris managed to persuade his parents but Murtaza’s family was reluctant in permitting their son to move out of Kashmir. Resultantly, Waris went to a College in Bangalore and opted for media studies and Murtaza got his admission in a local college and started studying humanities.

In the very first year of his graduation, Murtaza faced several months of curfew and turmoil in the wake of Burhan Wani’s killing, hurdling effective and smooth college working. Subsequently, it resulted in a delay in semester examinations, and ultimately leading to the extension of the whole course. Surprisingly, in late 2018 when he was still in his second year of graduation, Waris informed him about the completion of his degree.

“I was absolutely shocked,” Murtaza said. “To be honest, I felt embarrassed to tell him that I am not even halfway done with my graduation.”

Waris completed his graduation in 2018 and is now in the second year of his masters in the Mass Communication department at the Jamia Milia Islamia, Delhi. By the end of summer next year, he will have two degrees in hand and will be looking for a job while as Murtaza will be just hoping to graduate. On top of that, he has to seek admission for Masters Degree in a university which means more two to three years of studying.

The choice of college cost Murtaza a huge price of almost three years. He believes that after either getting hit by the ongoing political instability or any other hurdle, the University of Kashmir always wakes up late to the crises and is very slow to pick up and compensate.

“A three-year degree is now getting completed in more than four years, that too if end semester examinations are conducted on time. It can’t be justified anywhere outside Kashmir,” Murtaza said pensively. “The adage ‘Time is money’ loses its value right at the start here.”

When Kashmir’s Central University (CUK) announced its post-graduation entrance results in June 2019, 21-year-old Toyiba jumped with joy to find her name in the selection list of PG English, acquiring the third rank. A final semester student of English (Honours) at Women’s College, MA Road Srinagar, Toyiba had her entire career plan charted out in her mind when she sat in the entrance in May. Her graduation course which was supposed to complete in early 2019 had already missed many deadlines but she thought it will be over before the PG admissions would even start. Soon, she realized she was wrong.

The counselling sessions started one month after the entrance results were announced but there was still no sight of even a date sheet for semester examinations in colleges. She was refused an admission during counselling because her graduation was far from being complete. She got to know that her eleven classmates have also qualified the CUK entrance and are facing the same issue. After August 5,  everything was in a lockdown for more than three months including universities and colleges. As a semblance of normality started showing on the streets, the students approached the concerned authorities asking them to conduct their exams as soon as possible to minimize the loss. The authorities gave them a new deadline.

A student holding placard during a protest in Srinagar on March 2018. KL Image by Bilal Bahadur

“We were told that our last two semester exams will be held jointly in November but that never happened,” Toyiba said. “I can’t even express how helpless we feel. Seven months after we qualified PG entrance, we are at the same place in graduation where at the time of applying for the PG course.”

Toyiba along with the rest of eleven students contacted KU officials several times informing them about their issue but didn’t get any promising response, so far. The authorities at CUK, quite justifiably, turned them away citing official protocol. They categorically refused to allow admission of students who have their two semesters pending in graduation.

“They could only offer us their sympathy every time we approached them,” Toyiba said. “They said nobody is sure when our exams will be held, how our final result would turn out and they can’t violate the official procedure.”

Surprisingly, the Central University of Kashmir (CUK) waived off its official admission criteria for PG English course and advertised for new admissions to fill up the vacant positions. Only those students with good grades in English literature in graduation were eligible for the course before but now students from any stream with good grades in General English can apply.

After about six months of delay, 37 students were admitted in the PG course in total with batch capacity of 44. It officially nullified the admission of 12 graduation students who had qualified for the course but couldn’t join because their graduation wasn’t complete.

“CUK had to fill up the batch one day or other and we can’t blame them at all. They wouldn’t want to delay their degrees just because Kashmir University is running late in graduate courses. We  are on the losing side in every situation,” one of the 12 students said.

Ironically, they have to qualify the entrance exam once again that they already cracked with good points. Had the graduation degree completed on time, they would have been in second semester of their masters, already. “It is a tragedy that despite being the third topper, I couldn’t join my PG course. Now if we manage to qualify the entrance again next year, we would still lose a year in between. How can one get that much unlucky!” Toyiba regretted.

Things are messed up in the same way for Fayiza, an honours student in economics currently in her last semester of graduation. She qualified the PG entrance of Jamia Milia Islamia, Delhi which was held in the first week of July. Fayiza was selected for the masters’ course in Psychology and was supposed to join classes in August.

Students sitting in a lawn outside Humanities block of Kashmir University.

Unfortunately, her admission was nullified because her graduation was incomplete and there was no possibility that it could be completed in immediate future. With examination of last two semesters yet to take place, she fears the same situation might arise next year too. Despite encountering bad luck this year, she is keeping her fingers crossed for the next year entrance examination and hopes her graduation would be completed by then.

“We have lost complete faith in the education system here,” Fayiza said. “Anything can happen tomorrow and our degree could get extended to one more year and we would be able to do nothing about it.”

She believes that this is just the tip of an iceberg. Hundreds of students like her are missing great opportunities because of the ill-functioning education system and mal-administration of the academic space in Kashmir. Her few classmates qualified entrances in reputed institutions like Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) but couldn’t join. “Good opportunities don’t come along every now and then but we are helpless,” she regretted.

The students were promised that the examination of fifth and sixth semester will be conducted jointly in November but that didn’t happen either. Recently, the date sheet for their fifth semester examination was announced and the examinations were scheduled to start from December 18 and conclude on January 11, 2020. With sixth semester exam dates yet to be announced, students are concerned that the course could get stretched to 2020 summer which might cost them another year.

It is quite universal that students cringe at the mention of examinations but the case is completely opposite here. “We have literally begged the authorities several times to take our exams but to no avail. We don’t want to lose more precious time,” Fayiza said.

College students believe that the semester system has added to the mess and made the course more time consuming. A semester which was supposed to be completed in six months gets dragged for more than a year. Some of the students argue that any untoward incident throws everything out of gear for months in Kashmir but Kashmir University administration is neither able to hold examinations in time nor compensate the students for their loss.

“Last time we wrote our semester examination was in December, 2018. After a whole year, we are still in our graduation with two pending semesters,” Haris Sidiq, a sixth semester graduation student said. “At times, I regret opting graduation course here in the first place. It is the biggest mistake I have committed in my life so far.”

Students in Kashmir getting into the college systems enter clean-shaven and move out with their degrees with greying beards. Normally, graduation takes three years for six semesters in the colleges. “I entered the college in 2015 and was supposed to graduate in late 2017,” journalist Aakash Hasan said. “I completed my degree in 2018.”

Hasan said when he is analysing his last four years; he is astonished to understand that there was only four months of classwork in almost four years. “It was 2014 flood first and then turmoil of 2016 came,” Hasan said. “As we resumed classes, there was student agitation. We wrote examinations for two semesters in one go and for at least one of them, we had barely covered half of the syllabus.”

Tahir had joined the University of Kashmir after completing his graduation in four years. He got his masters in another four years in 2019. “There are students who completed their graduation in five years,” Tahir said.

The trend is across the board. For BSc in nursing, the AMT School that the GMC runs through the University of Kashmir, the students who had entered the premises in 2014 should have moved out with their degrees in 2018. Unlike other academic spaces, the SMHS hospital, being a teaching hospital, is not impacted by the turmoil. But the 2014 batch, is awaiting their four annual examinations.

The University of Kashmir is yet to hold the first-semester examination for the master’s students who entered the Naseem Bagh campus in 2018. Ideally, they should have written two examinations, so far.

This crisis is eating up the vitals of a huge population of the students. Many believe the semester system at graduation level as the main reason of the mess, which was started in 2015 and later changed to Choice Based Credit System (CBCS) in 2016.

Farooq Ahmad, Controller Examinations of the University of Kashmir said the first-semester examination is underway and 74000 students are appearing. For the fifth-semester examination starting this week, he said, there are 30000 students to be examined.

He further informed that the delay in degrees was mainly because the examinations were not conducted on time due to turmoil in the valley in 2016, then students unrest and now after the recent 2019 lockdown.

Allama Iqbal Library, Kashmir University (KL Image: Bilal Bahadur)

He added that in year-wise system, there would only be one exam a year which had a provision to be compensated.

Given the inordinate delay, some of the students who get enrolled for graduation either migrate to outside colleges, simply drop out for reasons of affordability or join the Open University system. This is the main reason why the students in the first semester are huge in number and their numbers fall in the subsequent semesters.

“We have 179000 students enrolled in our colleges across Jammu and Kashmir,” Talat Parvez, Secretary High Education said. “In Kashmir alone, there are around 120000 of them.” By an average, he said, around 45000 students complete their graduation, every year.

The abundant colleges and teacher-scarce education department has lead the department to use and abuse almost 1900 teachers as contractual lecturer for more than 15 years. Now, they have been disengaged in utter disregard of their contributions and status, reports Umar Mukhtar

Contractual teachers protesting in Srinagar. KL Image by Bilal Bahadur

Waheed Ahmad, 40, leaves his home every morning to catch a cab to reach state run Degree College at Chrar-e-Sharief, almost 30kms from his Pulwama home. After marking his attendance on a separate sheet of paper, not the official ‘arrival register’, he starts killing his time for the whole day. He has no work to do. He is accountable to none.

With an MPhil degree, Ahmad has been serving Jammu and Kashmir’s Higher Education Department since 2004. He is a ‘contractual lecturer’, who has been teaching history for a decade and a half and has served various institutions. All of a sudden, he and his entire tribe have been grounded. They have been verbally communicated that their arrangement is over: they have no work to do, and no pay to take home. Now they are planning to challenge it in the court of law.

Recently, when the University of Kashmir held the Under Graduate examinations, those supervising and superintending the exercise were teachers from the secondary and middle schools. The ‘contractuals’ were around, sitting idle and were not involved.

“In 2004, when I was selected through a proper procedure, I got felicitations from all of my relatives, acquaintances and friends,” said Ahmad. Since then, he is a lecturer. In reality, however, Ahmad’s fight for his identity and survival in the department never ended. After putting in more than 15 years, the department has “verbally” disengaged him. Till August 5, Ahmad was teaching students routinely and getting a salary of Rs22000. As he resumed his ‘duty’ later, the principal asked him and many other contractuals that they are disengaged. Since then, Ahmad has not earned a penny. “In 2004 when I joined the college I was getting Rs8000. Gradually it increased.”

Ahmad is not alone. Of the 1900 candidates across Jammu and Kashmir, around 1200 are from Kashmir. They all stand ‘disengaged.’What makes the disengagement suspiciously painful is that there is no formal order. The decision was conveyed verbally from top to bottom.

The disengagement has devoured their social identity. “People know me as a lecturer,” explains Ahmad. “How I will tell them after 15 years that I am not. Instead, I am jobless.”

On basis of the “assumed” status, these contractuals have built their lives –married, have kids who know that their fathers teach in colleges. The disengagement has crumbled their ‘house of cards’.

In 2010, under the erstwhile state’s service regulations act, when the services of all contractuals, ad-hoc and need-based employees who had put in seven years of service were regularized, the college contractual lecturers were left out. Soon, their department changed the nomenclature: ad-hoc lecturers became contractuals and contractual lecturers were re-designated as teaching assistants.

Contractual lecturers are a new innovation of the Jammu and Kashmir’s education department. Since the government runs too many colleges, it lacks the staff. Every season, it hires from a lot who prove their credentials every season. They are being paid for the work they do and disengaged for the winter, and re-hired once the academic season restarts.

When the candidates submit their applications, some of new applicants have high percentages. Under the system in vogue, the seniors do not make it to the list.To this bizarre scheme of meritocracy appointment, Ahmad was a victim.

In 2016, Ahmad could not make it to the list. “I was shocked when I was told that I am not figuring in the list.” How he spent that year explains the crisis the people like Ahmad face.

Ahmad, however, did not tell anything to either to his parents or to his newlywed wife. So to keep his secret, he was dressing up routinely in the morning and spending his day at his friend’s shop. At 4 pm, he would routinely reach home, giving impression to wife and parents that he came from the college. After he spent his last penny and was on the brink of bankruptcy, Ahmad joined a private school in another district, DPS Sangam for Rs7000.

“There were schools in my district as well but I was not comfortable there,” Ahmad said. “I would get exposed and that will destroy my life.” In order to protect his secret, he would rarely meet people, fearing his lies might get exposed.

Next year to his luck he could manage it to the list.

But 2016 was just a year. Post disengagement, Ahmad has his life to manage.

Now, Ahmad, with almost other 600 candidates, has approached the court that has given them a temporary relief. The court has directed a status quo, asking  the department to treat them as employees till there is not the disposal of the case. The college permits them in, gives them some space to sit and kill their tie. For their own satisfaction, these contractuals mark their own attendance for their own records.

Since they have not been paid since August, all of them are in mess.“I have a family of four members to manage,” Ahmad said.“I cannot afford the admissions of my kids in a private school.” Ahmad has a daughter 6 years of age and a three-year-old son.

Abdul Samad Wani, 53, has doctorate in Arabic and is NET (national eligibility test) qualified. Since 1997, he has been a contractual and his last “posting” is the state run college at Khan Sahib.

“We are not given any task in the college,” Wani said. “We are like the outcasts. Despite the court order, neither we get salaries nor are we treated employees anymore.”

Till 2014, Wani used to figure on top of the seasonal list. Not anymore. “Now I stand almost at serial 40. There is no privilege for the services we rendered to the department,” he said regretfully.

The higher education department has a nodal officer who scrutinizes the contractual candidates according to the merit. “In 1997 I got 60 per cent which was best of that time. How can we compete with the new generation that comes with a percentage of 80 to 90 per cent marks?”

Art Work by Malik Yasir

Competing with the candidates who have been their students at some point of time adds the element of humiliation. To fight the vagaries of his job and life, Wani said he did resort to things, he usually should not have done. Once when he required some money to get babyfood for his kid, he begged.

In 2016, when he failed to make it to the list, he went almost 50 kms away from his home, and worked as a paddy harvester. It triggered a drama as the paddy field owner’s son recognised him.“We cried like kids,” Wani said. “He took away the sickle from my hand, gave me some money and dropped me at my home.”

“When I joined the department, my daughter was just a year old,” said Wani in hate and anger. “Now she is 25 and I am told to get out of the college.”

Unlike men, the female contractual lecturers are in a worst condition. Lovely, 38, with MPhil in Urdu is presently posted at Pulwama. She shuttles more than 60 kms a day in coming and going from Srinagar.

Off late, Lovely said she is facing lot of music and taunts: ‘Why are you still dependent on others? File kouetwache? (Where is the status of your job file?)’ She even heard her students describing her as the Madam who wears a same dress daily.

Barieq Manzoor, a Downtown girl topped IGNOU’s BCom examination. It was beyond her expectations. In an interview with Saif Ullah Bashir, she says her success was the outcome of her ‘smart work’

Barieq Manzoor (KL Image by Bilal Bahadur)

Kashmir Life: Tell us about your schooling?

Barieq Manzoor (BM): My parents admitted me at Minto Circle School. I remained a favourite student of my teachers. I was the head girl. I generally scored the first position. What I am today is because of my school. Later on, I went to Government Girls Higher Secondary school Amira Kadal Srinagar. I work with dedication. I scored 96.4 per cent marks in twelfth class. I was at the sixth position all over the Kashmir. After that, I joined IGNOU.

KL: Your family background?

BM: Our family is small. I have an elder sister, mom and dad. I have no brother. They have a role in my success. Particularly my dad, my life is incomplete without him. He is my friend as well as a mentor. He never rejected any of my wishes. My father has struggled a lot so it is my responsibility to help him live a comfortable life. I always try to be a son for my family. I want to lessen their burden.

KL: Why did you choose IGNOU (Indra Gandhi National Open University) to continue your studies?

BM: It was my personal decision. I usually don’t consult anyone for suggestions.

KL:  Did your parents support your decision?

BM: As I told you earlier, my dad is my mentor and friend. My family supported my decisions. They have faith in me and I have tried to live up to their expectations.

KL: How was your experience with IGNOU?

BM: As far as IGNOU, there is no need to attend the classes on a daily basis. Our classes are held on Sundays. It was not an easy thing for me. Sometimes I felt socially detached but I didn’t give up. I used to miss my friends. Overall my experience was neither bitter nor sweet. But choosing IGNOU was the right decision for me.

KL: How do you spend your leisure?

BM: I help my parents. I learn driving. I learn shorthand. Reading Holy Quran is part of my routine.

KL: What is your goal in life?

BM: I want to crack civil services. It is my goal and I am hopeful that I will definitely succeed.

KL: Were you expecting the first position?

BM: Sincerely it was beyond my expectations. It was a gift from Almighty. In fact, when I read the letter sent by IGNOU, I read it thrice. It was as if I was dreaming. I will never forget that moment.

I was not at home. My mother received the letter which was sent by speed post. She informed me on the phone. When I read it there was no limit to my happiness.

KL:  What was the reaction of your parents?

BM: Both my parents kissed and hugged me. It was a great moment for them too.

KL: How did you prepare for exams? Did internet blockade affect your studies?

BM: I believe in smart work more than hard work. I always enjoyed studies. I used to go through notes and study the books recommended by IGNOU. Internet blackout didn’t affect me much. Fortunately, IGNOU conducted our exams before  August 5 and that time internet was working normally.

KL: Who was the chief guest of the convocation where you received the gold medal?

BM: The chief guest was Minister of Human Resource Development (MHRD) Ramesh Pokhriyal and the Vice-chancellor of IGNOU. The event was held in New Delhi. There were other VIP guests too.

KL: What is your message to those who discriminate against womenfolk?

BM: Several incidents have happened to me when I felt humiliated. My success is an appropriate response to them.  Now they will be ashamed of themselves and for their remarks. I proved that women are neither fools nor failures.

In a world besieged by the virus, people are working from their homes, using the high-speed Internet. In Kashmir, more than 1.5 million students are seeking better connectivity to keep the life going. In absence of it, some young boys and girls are innovating to get the students to virtual classrooms, reports Farzana Nisar

Artist Masood Hussain’s poster suggesting people to stay safe, indoors owing to the invisible virus.

On a sunny March afternoon, Mujtaba Bilal, a tenth class student cycles in the grassy front yard of his house in Kulgam. His mother, Nuzhat Jan repeatedly calls him inside to study. “You are playing since morning. Please come inside and study for a while,” shouts Nuzhat. Paying no heed to his mother, Mujtaba continues to glide on the pathways that surround the yard.

Just weeks ago, Mujtaba along with million other students in Kashmir had attended his classes for the first time in almost seven months. The situation that had emerged post-August 5 and the subsequent winter vacations had halted the smooth functioning of schools in Kashmir. But now when the outbreak of deadly Covid-19 has forced authorities to announce the closure of schools, students are once again restricted to their homes.

In the wake of this pandemic, students in other parts of the world have shifted to virtual classrooms; the lack of online learning platforms in the valley can take a heavy toll on education.

“Back in August, there was a complete communication blockade in Kashmir but today the presence of proper digital infrastructure could have helped a lot. It is the best alternative to offline classes,” said Nuzhat. “My son doesn’t listen to anyone when asked to read. Schools should make online lessons to keep children busy with studies these days.”

Not just the parents of school-going children, the need for ed-tech platforms is also felt by college and university students who earlier lost their academic session to 2019 lockdowns.

 “While much harm has been done by the earlier unrests in Kashmir, the technology-enabled forms of learning could prove to be a saviour. We already lost our entire semester to recent shutdowns and would not like that to happen again,” said Toiba Bashir, a post-graduate student at the University of Kashmir. “We know that our institutions are not digitally that advanced but e-learning should be on their priority list now. All our teachers have to do is to record the lectures and post them.”

Efforts by Academicians

Concurring that online learning is a second substitute to in-person delivery, a number of professors from different colleges of Kashmir have turned to Google classrooms to teach their students. Dr Irshad A Wani, Assistant Professor Chemistry at Government Degree College Anantnag took to social networking site Facebook and said, “We have started a series of classes on Google classroom for the on-going CBSC BG second semester in Chemistry. Kindly communicate the message to the students in your vicinity so as to assure the maximum participation of students.”

Hailing such efforts students believe that more and more teachers should start teaching them online. “Following the instructions of our principal, teachers of different departments are making use of Google classrooms to reach out to students. Our teachers have started to upload PowerPoint presentations and it will save us a lot of precious time,” said Saif Bhat, a student of Cluster University, Srinagar. “All other educational institutions should start the online teaching process as soon as possible,” he added.

The Directorate of School Education Kashmir also said that it is making efforts to engage teachers for online lessons. Director DSEK, Mohammad Younis Malik said that the department has found onscreen classes as the only option to compensate for the academic losses of the student. “We are looking forward to engaging skilled teachers to deliver on-screen lessons through Doordarshan channels and other cable networks,” Malik said.

Kashmir artist Masood Hussain’s recent work making a demand for the restoration of high-speed internet for fighting the Coronavirus.

Moreover, the Department of School Education J&K in association with Radio Mirchi has started Mirchi master class radio learning project for students from ninth to twelfth classes. Arun Manhas, State Project Director, Samagra Shiksha, J&K informed the students that they can access the e-content and e-books of NCERT by using DIKSHA App (Digital Infrastructure for Knowledge Sharing).

Education Multimedia Research Centre (EMMRC), University of Kashmir also urged students to use the digital platform provided by the Consortium for Educational Communication in collaboration with them. In a statement issued by the Director EMMRC, KU, Dr Shahid Rasool said, “While being at home the students could connect with the CEC digital platforms for the courseware available.” He said these channels are free to air and can be accessed through your cable operator. The statement further reads that UG and PG MOOC’s (Massive Open Online Courses), which were earlier delivered on SWAYAM platform, are being archived and may be accessed by any learner.

Need for Internet

Nevertheless, the students want the availability of high-speed Internet to access educational content online. “We already lack local e-learning platforms in Kashmir and whatever little is available we cannot even download that on such a low speed.  How can we watch video lectures on YouTube without 4G? If students don’t have access to 4G, their value is useless,” said Adnan, an undergrad student.

Saqlain Mushtaq, a student of Aligarh Muslim University, who has returned to  Kashmir amid coronavirus scare said that his university has decided to upload the e-content including video lectures through education portals like SWAYAM. “But here in Kashmir I will not be able to benefit from it,” he said.

Mudasir Nazar, an engineering graduate, said that education has always been the biggest casualty in Kashmir and the government is largely responsible for it. “Today when, in the rest of the world, students are learning from home using online tools, we in Kashmir struggle with throttled 2G internet,” he said.

“Moreover, if the school education department is mulling televised classes, I do not expect it to be that big a success. It will be too little, too late,” he added.

Digital Divide

While some private institutions in the Srinagar city and other major towns are exploring the academic cyberspace to deliver lessons to their students, most of the rural schools are not as equipped.

Delhi Public School, Srinagar has opened up its content library for the students on YouTube, where the video lectures are available online. “It is good to see that the lectures are well sorted according to the classes and subjects. It seems as if we attend our regular classes daily while sitting in our homes,” said Mehak, a student of DPS. Likewise, SRM Welkin Higher Secondary School, Sopore is also uploading lectures on YouTube to benefit its students. Some other schools have started sending assignments to the students through e-mails.

Students of Kothi Bagh girls higher secondary school attending morning assembly after schools reopen. KL image by Bilal Bahadur

However, many schools in rural areas lack the technology, teacher training and in some cases internet access too to deliver such lessons. “Schools in villages lag behind. They can’t create online learning sites for their students. Although there is a mass availability of educational content on the Internet lectures by respective teachers can keep students interested. They realize the seriousness of the matter only when they see it coming from someone who teaches in their school,” said Aadil Ahmad, a resident of Damhal village in Kulgam.

“My daughter reads in a local village school. They don’t even have my email address, how can I expect them to create online lessons,” he added.

Volunteer Initiatives

Being used to the months-long unrests and shutdowns, volunteers from Kashmir have time and again proved to be the saviours in times of distress. Internet or no Internet, they have always responded when Kashmiris were in need. Post-August 5, as education suffered, people set up community tuition centres to help the students and today once again volunteers have come up with ideas to keep students busy with books.

Sajid Khan, a young boy in his twenties from Manjgrah village in Baramulla has started an initiative to teach students of Kashmir online. A journalism graduate from Chandigarh, Sajid with the help of local educated boys have decided to deliver free online YouTube classes for sixth to tenth classes. “In these times when personal tuitions are not an option, I thought it is better to utilize my YouTube channel Kashmir Now to deliver online lessons. Many people have turned up for the cause and we now are a team of 10 people,” said Sajid.

Coronavirus: As Epidemic Looms Large, Kashmir’s 4G Desperation Surges

Umeed Coaching Centre Sheeri, a local coaching institute has volunteered to participate and support their initiative. “They have provided us with their classrooms where we can deliver the lecture to be recorded.” Censuring the low-speed internet, Sajid said that it took him hours to upload the video content online.

In Shangergund area of north Kashmir’s Sopore, Aabid Sofi, a recent tenth class pass out from JNV (Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalaya ) Baramulla is busy in making time table for his free online class website. As coronavirus shut down schools, Aabid also created an online platform, Blooming Dales for students to learn. Unlike other YouTube classes, he initiated more of an online webinar, where students through live chats can ask questions and pose queries. “We have a mass of video lectures available online, but what they lack is teacher-student interaction. So I decided to build a platform where both teachers and students can come forward to create much of a classroom type of atmosphere,” Aabid said. “This platform provides video lectures, quizzes, monthly exam, discussion and debates. We also keep track of student’s activities in addition to parental contact. All the students have to do is sign up and enter the access code given to them.”

Being a student himself, Aabid is desirous of getting benefited from his own initiative as qualified people from all over the valley have volunteered to teach in these classes. “Because of my inclination towards technology, I with the help of some of the friends was able to start the website. I cannot teach myself but more than 30 experienced teachers have joined us.”

Earlier, Aabid had started an online learning platform, e-class but owing to the low-speed Internet in the valley it couldn’t function well. “Due to 2G, teachers, as well as students, were not able to access it properly. So, I created Blooming Dales, which is light as compared to the previous one.”

As the virus jammed Wuhan in China and triggered a global appetite for personal protection equipment (PPE), a young innovator in Srinagar decided to jump into the ring. Finally, he has produced a low-cost face shield that doctors say is better and of great help. The beauty of the innovation is that anybody can produce it at home, reports Syed Samreen

A doctor in District Hospital Pulwama wearing the face shield that a young innovator designed to manage the dearth of PPEs world over. KL Image: Special arrangement

In December 2019, when people around the world couldn’t decipher how huge of an outbreak would befall humanity, Jawaaz Ahmad had sort of premonition that he must do something to alleviate the shortage of protective equipment for doctors. His thought process was in response to the shortage of basic protective gear that the world felt short of, overnight.

Jawaaz, 28, a young innovator who is a design fellow in the Design Innovation Centre of Islamic University of Science and Technology (IUST), did some exercise within days. He wanted to innovate a protective gear for the frontline workers fighting against the Coronavirus that has been infected the health workers across the globe. Apart from identifying the particular gear, he wanted it to be something that is low-cost, effortless to make and most of all effective.

Kashmir’s Mask Manager

Finally, Jawaaz came up with the idea of a protective gear worn to shield the face from any kind of splash and of course to avoid any possibility of contracting the virus. The protective ‘Splash Guard’ made by Jawaaz didn’t just benefit a bunch of people as he had earlier thought, but instead, the idea was taken up on the bigger level where doctors in Kashmir found it extremely beneficial at the time of critical equipment shortage.

A Face Shield or the Splash Guard is something that protects a person from potentially infectious materials and chemical splashes. The one that Jawaaz makes serves the purpose of any other splash guard except that they are low-cost and easy to make. After receiving tremendous support from doctors, the ever-so-encouraged Jawaaz decided to increase the production of the face shields.

Jawaaz Ahmad, a design fellow at DIC IUST, Awantipora, has been working on devising a low cost shield since early 2020 when the onset of virus in China triggered a huge demand for the personal protection equipment for health workers. KL Image: Special Arrangement

“I was convinced that I could make something impermeable and effective for the doctors and other healthcare members and so I decided to experiment with plastic sheets,” Jawaaz told Kashmir Life.

Jawaaz did a lot of homework before actually starting it. He found that the routine surgical mask may not be as protective as the doctors require. The sub-microscopic Coronavirus measures just 80-120 nanometres and the pore size of the masks used daily ranged from 1200 to 56000 nanometres. This means that doctors require something impenetrable. This led him to reach his DIY face splash guard.

“The best thing about it is that anyone can make it and it only takes 15 minutes to make one,” Jawaaz said. “The material required can be found at home.”

After making the first set of the shields, Jawaaz sent over 200 pieces to four major hospitals of Srinagar: 58 pieces to GB Pant Hospital, 21 to SKIMS, Soura, 80 to CD Hospital, 15 to SMHS Hospital and 61 to District Hospital Pulwama.

“I have a lot of pending requests from other district hospitals to supply them the shields,” Jawaaz said. “I have now started making these guards on a daily basis and at the end of the day I can end up with almost 40-60 of them.”

Motivated by Dr Shahkar Ahmad Nahvi, IUST’s Coordinator Design Innovation, the icebreaker innovation by this young Kashmiri has sent flutters across the valley and perhaps in the country too.

“After it was tested and approved by many doctors, twenty days into the making, now everyone is manufacturing the shields at home and giving them away to the frontline warriors fighting the invisible enemy, for free,” Dr Nahvi said.

Recently, Nehvi said, students from Kashmir University, social workers from prominent NGO, Athrout and even faculty members of Aligarh Muslim University have taken to manufacturing them.

Innovator Jawaaz Ahmad wearing his innovation, the low-cost face splash shield that is currently being used by various hospitals in Kashmir. KL Image: Special Arrangement

Dr Nahvi encouraged Jawaaz to make the video of the procedure public so that people across take the idea up and the young innovators of Kashmir get encouraged producing new things that could prove beneficial and useful in these testing times.

Supportive of Jawaaz, Dr Talib Khan, an Associate professor in SKIMS said that he and the other fellow doctors appreciated and lauded Jawaaz on the initiative that he had taken.

“After Jawaaz showed me the sample, I suggested him to improvise on the model as it seemed that it would be much needed henceforth,” Dr Khan said.

Dr Khan, who himself has been an active innovator of healthcare equipment in the past, said that the boy once stayed with him till late in the night to work and improve upon his model. “The best thing you can do while sitting at home is to start contributing to the outer world by innovating even the smallest of things that can be useful at the times of tribulation,” Dr Khan asserted.

Till date, Jawaaz has made a total of 261 face guards out of which the 26 recently manufactured pieces were sent to the IUST quarantine centre for the workers in charge.

Unmasked

Dr Tufaila Shafi of the GB Pant Hospital was  in complete appreciation of the young innovator.  “The boy isn’t even a part of the medical fraternity but he still went all out to try and benefit us from his innovation,” he said.

Doctors all over the world are using this kind of a shield, Dr Shafi said, but in Kashmir, it was not available and it had sparked a wave of insecurity in us. She said that once the GB Pant authorities approved the sample, they gave another order for the guards as it gave them a sense of protection. “The boy has reached to hundreds of doctors and contributed to their security and protection without any monetary interests,” she said.

Pulmonologist Dr Naveed Nazir Shah, who is heading the Chest Disease Hospital, the main Covid-19 Hospital said the innovation is hugely useful and a flawless effective gear. “It is light-weight and doesn’t fog the view,” Dr Naveed said. “In certain interventional procedures, there is aerosol generation and the shield being impermeable doesn’t let any aerosols pass through it. It has been extremely helpful to us.”

Coronavirus: Are We Ready?