KASARGOD: The story of Bineesh Balan portrays the hurt and humiliation faced by Dalits pursuing higher education.
For Bineesh Balan, a 25-year-old tribal student from Kasargod, it was an uphill task to fight the caste inequalities that marginalise and exclude the Dalits. The casteist bureaucracy in Kerala was determined to fail him. But he achieved his goal through sheer determination. When Binesh Balan landed in London in the last week of July to pursue his master’s degree in anthropology at the University of Sussex, it was a dream come true for a tribal boy born at Kolichal, a small nondescript village in Kasargod district.
When Express contacted him over phone, Bineesh Balan was beaming with pride. “In the end, everything fell in place. It’s liberating to be here,” he said.Bineesh, who belongs to Mavilan community, is now in London thanks to the Central government’s National Overseas Scholarships for Scheduled Tribe students.Bineesh had been trying to avail of the government scholarship to pursue his higher education in London since 2014. He first got admission at the University of Sussex in November, 2014. Though he applied for financial support from the Directorate of Scheduled Tribe Development, the response was not encouraging.
“I came to know about it after seeing an order by the directorate sanctioning Rs 20 lakh to the son of a KPSC member. His family was well-off, still he managed to get public money to pursue his studies in France. I knew I was more deserving and so I applied,” said Bineesh, whose parents had stopped working as daily-wage labourers due to bad health. But the section officer at the Secretariat rejected Bineesh’s application, saying he would not get more than Rs 5 lakh. “When I mentioned the KPSC member’s case, the section officer said they had the influence to pull it off,” he said. Not ready to give up, Bineesh met the then Minister for Scheduled Tribes Welfare P K Jayalakshmi with the help of V S Sunil Kumar, who is now a minister. “She appreciated me and cleared Rs 27 lakh for my education,” he said. But the officers at the Secretariat sought a cabinet clearance. As the classes were to start in September, he wrote to the university seeking more time.
On October 15, 2015, the Cabinet chaired by the then Chief Minister Oommen Chandy considered his application as a special case and cleared the minister’s order to sanction Rs 27 lakh. “But the higher officers knew how to stonewall even cabinet decisions and I didn’t get the money,” he said.More than the denial of funds, it was the sniggering and casteist remarks of the officers that hurt Bineesh. “I had come up the hard way. Despite meeting all the conditions, they couldn’t help smirking at me because I was an Adivasi,” he said. A disgusted Bineesh lodged a complaint with the Kerala State Commission for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. “But when I went to the department to find the status of my file, the top officer was derisive. He wanted to know why I approached the commission,” he said.
The officer reportedly told him he knew how to reply to a notice from the commission. Later, the top officer called the section officer to his chamber and “the two officers together harassed and humiliated me,” said Bineesh.Not ready to give up, he went home and applied again. He got admission for the next academic year at the same university. By then the LDF had replaced the UDF in government, but the attitude of the officers had not changed. He missed out again.Then he applied for the Central government’s scholarship. “I attended the interview in Delhi on February 12, 2016 and the result were published in the same month. I was among the 20 persons selected,” he said.
Bineesh said he would return to India only after completing his PhD at the Harvard or Oxford or any other top university in the world. “I don’t want their money. I’ll come back and make a difference,” he said.Shumin S Babu, assistant director, Education, at the Directorate of Scheduled Tribe Development, said Binesh Balan had first applied for educational aid on December 12, 2014 for a course starting in September, 2015. The government order sanctioning Rs 27 lakh came from the Secretariat on November 9, 2015. But since the course had already started, the government order had to be reworked, he said. On December 12, 2015, Bineesh submitted another letter saying he could join a ‘new course’ in January, 2016 in the same university, said Babu.
So the department forwarded that letter to the secretariat on December 22, 2015. “On January 5, 2016, we got a reply from the Secretariat asking for Binesh’s offer letter from the university,” he said.
Babu said he was not privy to the details of the file movement.While the officials were shuttling his file between the Secretariat and the directorate, Bineesh got the Central scholarship in February 2016.