If education, and particularly Higher Education, is to serve as the lever to the great surge forward of the Indian nation, the scourge of ragging which corrodes the vitals of our campuses needs to be curbed. Appreciating this, the Hon’ble Supreme Court of India was pleased to direct us to give suggestions on the means of prevention of ragging in educational institutions. We feel privileged to submit our report on the menace of ragging and measures to curb it.

When we embarked on this task, we did not anticipate the overwhelming response and the enormous interest that would be generated by this topic. Interviews and interactions with academics, students (including victims of ragging), parents, teachers, administrators, employees of universities and colleges, civil society activists, psychologists , sociologists, legal experts, media persons, political representatives, office bearers of student organizations and statutory authorities, representatives of State Governments and local authorities – the list is long – helped us in understanding the enormity of the challenge.

We are not the first Committee to go in to the question of ragging. The issue has been studied in the past. Institutions of higher education are also bound by the directions/ guidelines of the Hon’ble Supreme Court in the “Vishwa Jagriti Missions” matter.

We cannot claim that we have fully understood all aspects of the constraints that need to overcome; yet the following emerge from our exercise, which may have a reasonable potential to change the situation:
•  Primary responsibility for cubing ragging rests with academic institution themselves
•  Ragging adversely impacts the standards of higher education
•  Incentives should be available to institutions for curbing the menace, there should also be disincentives for failure to do so
•  Enrolment in academic pursuits or a campus life should not immunize any adult citizen from penal provisions of the laws of the land
•  Ragging needs to be perceived as our failure to inculcate human values from the schooling stage Behavioral patterns among students, particularly potential ‘raggers’, need to be identified
• Measures against raging must deter its recurrence
•  Concerted action is required at the level of the school, higher educational institution, district administration, university, State and Central Governments to make any curb effective
•  Media and the civil society should be involved at all stages