Statistics

• Children aged 8 to 18 spend 7hrs and 38min a day using entertainment media, logging almost 11 hrs media usage a day – Article of TIME, Feb 21 2011

• The Average attention span at present is just 5 seconds long. Ten years ago it was 12 minutes. This is an indication of effect of social media and Technology – Pew Research Institute

• India has highest rate of suicides among people with aged 15 to 29. In 2013, 2,471 students committed suicides due to “failure in examination” and not able to cope up with pressure. -http://scroll.in/article/694364/four-charts-show-why-indias-youth-suicide-rate-is-among-the-worlds-highest

• 56,700 teenage abortions in Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata and Chennai in 2014-15. – The third National Family Health Survey (NFHS)

• Premarital sex among 18- to 20-year-olds in metros is as high as 13.6 per cent amongst girls and 15.3 amongst boys. -https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3425247/

Reasons for Troubled Youth

Students are adolescents. They need education. Whom do they learn from? Not just the teachers but from everyone! We may not be teachers but through our example and conduct each and every one of us contribute to the development of the students. A student gets it’s values from the corpus of society. Our students will only be as good as the conduct they observe in the society. Unfortunately, today in India, we as a society, can’t be called as the best teachers. Till the time greed will govern the society, we will only empower the lower side of others. Each human has a divine side and a bestial side. Greed empowers the bestial side or the lower side. Let’s see for a moment from the eyes of a common student in India. What experience does he/she receive while struggling to get good education? Prominently it is GREED everywhere! When a student wants to study in a good coaching institute having enormously high fees, one only sees greed. In most elite coaching institutes, the teachers to student ratio is simply pathetic. Batch size is 150, sometimes as much as 200! The best teachers are only available for top 2% of the students in the institute – for MAXIMIZING the profits. For all others their fate is mediocracy and crowd. Most coaching’s don’t bother to solve problems in the main tuition hours as they are billing highly paid teachers who are EFFICIENTLY UTILIZED for institute’s profits. Doubts are left for below average low paid teachers who can’t satisfy the students. Then a student goes to hostel (sometimes coaching institutes make it compulsory to stay in their own hostel!). They get to eat the food which has been cooked with attention on only one thing – MAXIMIZE profits. So they students don’t complain there are unhealthy tongue satisfiers from time to time. For the hostel owners what matters the most is that the student somehow stays yearlong with them to maximize their profits. There is no care on what’s happening to the character of the student. There is no monitoring of what inputs the student is taking in, how much he/she is studying and what he is going through. And the poor parents, they feel that if somehow or other the student COMPETES, he has a chance to survive in the world. Many students admit heavy pressure from their home to improve their performance in the environment filled with GREED. Guess what? GREED EMPOWERS THE LOWER SIDE of our students. Vedic India was different. Education was not a profession for earning profit. Hostels were places to nurture the character of the student and to feel him being cared for. Parents gave freedom to children to decide their career option. And the society had a spirit of selfless service. Our students deserve much better teenage experience. ARJUNA is dedicated to serve the student community (and their parents & teachers too).