Being a Bengali staying in Kolkata, or in any other town in Bengal, how many times have you seen your neighbour’s son, your colleague’s daughter, one or more of your nephews or nieces travel outside their state for studies or a job? I am sure such instances are countless.
Since I was born in Kolkata and spent 25 years of my life here before shifting base, I can elaborate the situation particularly prevalent in the capital city with authenticity. Let us start with the schools. Parents are spoilt for choices when they have to choose a school for their kids – you have Don Bosco Park Circus, La Martinere, St Thomas, St James, Calcutta Boys, St Xaviers Collegiate School, Ashok Hall, Prat Memorial, Loreto House, Gokhale Memorial, South Point High School, Carmel High School, Mahadevi Birla Girls High School Modern High School for Girls, Bethune Collegiate, Hindu School, Bagbazar Multipurpose, and Narendrapur Ramakrishna Mission Collegiate school among the traditional powerhouses. Then you also have DPS and Heritage School who have set up campuses recently in the city and offer the state-of –the-art education facilities to the children. Hence parents cannot even think of sending their kids outside Kolkata for their scholastic education because they have faith in all schools above.
However once the kid passes out of school, a gamut of possibilities arise. The first consideration for further studies in Bengal is the WBJEE. Besides Jadavpur University (JU), which has an All-India rank of about 15 (In our days it was in the top 10), the parents have no faith in any other engineering college. BESU (earlier famously known as Shibpur BE College) is more engrossed in a perpetual mesh of student politics and internal strife. Among the rest, not too many inspire confidence.
Hence if a student fails to get into JU, parents start thinking of sending the child either to Bangalore, or Manipal Institute of Technology, or BHU, or to the numerous reputed engineering colleges in Maharashtra. The situation in General streams is a little better because you have colleges like Presidency, St Xaviers, Lady Brabourne, Bethune, North City, Surendranath College, and Deenbandhu Andrews which command respect. However the irony is that most students who do well in their Class 12 board exams, especially in Science Stream, do not want to study general subjects.
The situation goes from bad to worse for post graduate studies. There is not even a single institute, apart from selected streams in University of Calcutta, in which students dream of completing their Masters. The job situation is not any better either. Besides Sector V in Salt lake City, which is a bastion for software professionals hired from almost any background, you do not have too much to look forward to. People like me, who want to work in their area of expertise of core engineering, have very few opportunities in Kolkata. That is the saddest part of it all.
The number of talented Bengali students who work or do a Masters in Kolkata is only a minor percentage of the number of good students who pass out of Kolkata’s schools. If we have 20 outstanding schools, we have only 7-8 good colleges, 2 good engineering colleges and 1 good university. The numbers do tell a story. Its time the administration wakes up to this menace, set up some good universities and invest in industries in Bengal, so that we do not just keep losing talent so cheaply.
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