• Teachers need to be empathetic so first-year students can open up if they face harassment in the hostel or class.
• Teachers must not consider the students approaching them with complaints of harassment as some kind of trouble. They should encourage the students to confide in them.
• Teachers must speak to senior students and break the myth that juniors can only be groomed through ragging.
• Teachers must be aware of the UGC regulations onragging.

Psychiatrists and counsellors who attended a workshop at Jadavpur University on teachers’ role in combating ragging offered several suggestions.

A first-year student died in the university’s main hostel in August last year allegedly after being ragged by senior students.

A JU official said a UGC team that visited the campus following the student’s death a month later reported that most of the JU teachers were not even aware of the various rules that the regulator had introduced in 2009 to curb ragging.

In JU, in some cases, the teachers have been accused of creating roadblocks so students found involved in ragging by the university’s own probe can escape punishment.

Gautam Bandyopadhyay, the head of the psychiatry department of Medical College, Kolkata, said in his address: “The JU student who died here last year came from... a district. I frequent the district and someone told me he came from an ordinary background. In JU, many students come from such backgrounds.

“What happens with students from such backgrounds is that they tend to be shy and, in some cases, find it difficult to adapt to a university. Some sort of inhibitions work in them. It is here that the role of teachers becomes important. They need to be their mentors helping them to adapt and grow.”

He said there was a need for “man-marking” so these students could be helped with proper care.

A JU official said they have “observed” that the students who find it difficult to adapt and are shy often become soft targets of ragging.

Bandyopadhyay later told Metro: “The teachers need to be more empathetic so the students, particularly those in the first year, can reach out to them if they encounter any issue in the hostel or the campus. The teachers should not treat those students as some sort of a hazard. Rather, the teachers should create space so the students can confide in them freely.”

He stressed that the student “who is most vulnerable must get this confidence from the teachers that if anything untoward happens, someone will be there to stand by his side”. Such a student should not be allowed to feel that he or she is alone.

UGC regulations on Curbing the Menace of Ragging in Higher Educational Institutions, 2009, say: “Prevention of ragging will be the collective responsibility at all levels of the institution, including the faculty, and not that of the specific body or committee only constituted to prevent ragging.”

Saumitra Basu, who heads the counselling cell of the university, said: “While interacting with the first-year students, the teachers must empower them. While interacting with students in the second and third year, the teachers must try to rid them of the idea that through ragging they can make the junior students smart and strong. Those who rag nurture this flawed notion. The teachers can track the potential offenders from those who harbour such flawed ideas.”

All 600-odd teachers at JU had been invited to the workshop. Only about 100 turned up, said an official. Vice-chancellor Bhaskar Gupta and pro-VC Amitabha Datta were among them.

“We had expected that teachers would take part in more numbers at Friday’s event,” said Parthapratim Roy, the general secretary of the Jadavpur University Teachers’ Association, which organised the workshop.