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Patna,(BiharTimes): Women teachers dealing with students, especially college girls, think that the latter should not wear provocative dresses like skin-tight jeans, shorts, mini-skirts and sleeveless vests or tops.
So like some other places, first prestigious Patna Women’s College and now Nagadh Mahila College, another premier institute of Patna University, banned them from wearing these skimpy dresses.
From August 13 the new dress code came into effect in Magadh Mahila College. |
Those imposing the ban are not Talibanized lot, but modern educated women, perhaps more qualified than women’s rights groups and some girls, who are opposing the move. Patna Women’s College in fact is run by Christian nuns.
The decision to ban such dresses reminds one of the demand in Britain last September to ban high school girls from wearing mini-skirts. The demand had the backing of a sizeable number of school managements and parents too.
During admission in Magadh Mahila College, students were asked to fill up a form stating that they would not come to the class sporting jeans and shorts.
According to Shashi Sharma, a senior teacher of Magadh Mahila College, at the induction, the college will issue the directive prohibiting girls from wearing jeans and sleeveless upper outfits on the campus.
She said teachers would inspect classrooms from Monday and anyone found sporting jeans and sleeveless tops would be issued a warning.
“We will issue the directive for the safety of the students. It has been found that many a times, girls wear provoking clothes invite unnecessary trouble,” she was quoted in the Telegraph recently.
What is unusual about the two PU colleges are that they are not co-ed institutions yet they are taking, what they call, preventive measures.
There are many private institutions and coaching classes in Patna too, which not only ban girls from wearing skimpy dresses but they donot even allow boys to wear certain types of dresses. But the irony is that when the dress code is imposed on boys no such protests are made in the media or any other organizations. They accept it in the name of discipline.
But women rights activists like Kanchan Bala does not agree. She said that it is not necessarily that girls wearing provocative dresses are unsafe. She said that the two girls recently gang-raped in Silao in Nalanda district were not dressed in skimpy dresses. Cases of rapes and gang-rapes are pouring in regularly from all nooks and corners of the state and in most of the cases girls are not clad in tight-jeans or sleeveless tops.
Kanchan is the leader of Mahila Atyachar Virodhi Morcha, which recently took up the cause of the gangrape of a high school girl in Patna by seven youths, a couple of them sons of very influential persons.
But then most women rights activists and girls, who are protesting, have no answer when cited the example of dress code strictly imposed for boys in various institutions.
They are imposed to bring about a sort of decency and in some cases uniformity too. After all class-rooms are not fashion shows and there is no scope of casualness. Those who have imposed the dress code have given a lot of thought to it, commented a critic.
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