When I compared the fee structure of fashion colleges across India a decade ago, NIFT clearly stood out with the best balance of quality and money. NIFT, being a government autonomous body admits students from myriad of socio-economical backgrounds, including reservations for not just the socially under-privileged sections but even the elite communities through management/NRI quota. I found myself amidst vast socio-economical diversity – from millionaires of Delhi to students who on vacations, returned home to remote villages. I faintly remember reading in Shefali Vasudev’s Powder Room that Rahul Mishra made it big from very modest backgrounds; a mud house in a village near Kanpur. Indian fashion runways command an array of talented names, many from NIFT, mostly with savarna surnames that boast social status & even point to wealthy family-lines. But how do students from financially under-privileged or middle-class backgrounds fare in the college? What’s the plight of Rahul Mishras with non-Brahminical surnames in Indian fashion colleges like NIFT? What do they do after college?

 

MONEY = MARKS

This is not always the case but it’s not uncommon either.  A prominent fashion designer was part of the external jury panel for the summer internship project I did in Bangalore. He literally asked me why my document was so thin (barely 50-something pages) when there were other assignment documents wearing the look of a telephone directory. Now he put that question to me even without going through the document, not even a rough flip. I bluntly told him I was financially broke, didn’t have the money to print as many pages (it costs about Rs.20-25 a side those days at Nehru place in Delhi) and hence compressed the same content in as many pages, it’s less cumbersome, friendlier to read & understand that way. Not that I ever expected him to buy those words but I was definitely curious to get a reaction from him – He gave me the dirts… And it turned out he also gave me the least grades. No surprise in that reaction. The marks at NIFT are often directly proportional to the thickness of the document and price of the material going into the assignments.

If not the money itself, putting in lots of time and detailing fetches you labour-sympathy marks. There was a clear emphasis on the hard work itself than ideas, imaginations or creativity during my five-year stay at the NIFT New Delhi.

In many ways, the students are trained to toil like sweatshop labourers who can later serve the export houses that violate human rights and pimp our local labour to international labels at throw away prices.

It didn’t take long for me to connect the dots & fill the larger puzzle. It didn’t take long to not care for validation in form of marks as long as I could get my degree and flee the rotting bureaucratic ineptitude I found myself in.

 

RITUALS OF JUSTICE INACCESSIBLE TO STUDENTS WITHOUT POWER & MONEY

I was debarred from writing my last exam & my examination hall ticket was maliciously taken away by NIFT lab assistant without my knowledge before my last exam in my second semester at college in 2009. They literally hid it & asked me to collect it from the Delhi Center Coordinator. Apparently, there were differences held between Delhi centre & Head office on whether I should be given a chance to write exams since my attendance was 8% short of minimum req. 65% in a subject which was earlier covered up on medical credits since I missed classes due to typhoid followed by chicken pox in January 2009. By the summer, I had already written all the final sem exams and there was just one more to go.

The centre coordinator of 1st year batch asked me to take the issue to the Director General of NIFT and he didn’t entertain an audience with me even after writing 17 letters explaining my academic capability, how I was diagnosed with genuine health problems & how I still managed to finish my assignments & I deserved to give my last exam when I’ve already given all the other exams, for which I’ve put on extra efforts despite my health conditions. I would wait outside his office for weeks without food or water wondering who the fuck does this man meet if not students of this college? Phone calls, letters all in vain. The exams which I already gave, spending physical effort, time & money (NIFT assignments are expensive af), they were all scrapped. This meant my educational loan would be screwed, I wanted to drop out of NIFT, but I wasn’t financially equipped then to do even that.

I joined NIFT Delhi with All India Rank 1 in my counselling & now I had a semester back & it was the first time as an adult that I genuinely considered suicide as an option to put an end to this fight happening on uneven power disparities. I had the courage to do it but it didn’t rationally make sense especially when it’s people who cared for me who’ll eventually be affected. I returned home. That’s when I said FUCK NIFT & these incompetent corrupt people running the college & wrote actively on this Purushu Arie fashion blog to create a fashion realm of my own that’s unaffected by the powerful elites who love to put down & suppress students from less-fortunate economical backgrounds. Indian government run educational institutions are saturated with such modern day Dronacharyas who mercilessly chop the fingers of millions of Ekalavyas, while Arjunas buy their way up with political/economical/social power.

 

FINANCIAL ASSISTANCE

NIFT has financial assistance programs where they refund up to 75% of the tuition fee.  The paper work involved is somewhat less favourable to students who provide salaried pay slip as opposed to more independent channel of income.

There are other financial schemes mentioned in NIFT websites and brochures, but I never managed to practically avail any those schemes simply because you don’t know who or where to avail it from, especially when one office points to another, till it boomerangs and you eventually lose patience and say: fuck this shit, I don’t have time to complete my assignments, forget this tiresome game of musical chairs leading to emptiness.

In fact, my refundable caution deposit amounting to some 4-5 thousands, supposed to be paid by the college in 2013 right when I graduated is yet to be cleared as of 10^th April 2018, in spite of phone and email enquiries to NIFT officials.  It’s a conventional sarkari office where you’ll have to wait forever but they’ll never ever have time for you.

 

OVER-PRICED FOR WHAT IT RETURNS

NIFT is funded on IIT-IIM model. In fact, NIFT New Delhi is the only Indian college to even feature in world’s top 30-50 lists in its respective field of expertise, and yet, the returns through campus placements at NIFT is nowhere in comparison to that of IITs or IIMs. Despite being a government run institution, NIFT is a very expensive place to study at. The assignments are expensive, most NIFTs don’t have structured hostel fee or mess fees for educational loans to cover up the living/food expenses. In spite of shelling out a bomb for education, what you take back monetarily through campus placements at NIFT is very likely to be less than what your fellow engineering or doctor buddies do. NIFT students are largely placed in Indian retail houses or export houses where they’re mostly overworked and underpaid. A few wealthy kids with twice-born caste surnames manage to launch a label of their own after graduation, and the richest of the rich gets to lobby at fashion weeks, and a handful perhaps, who make it there on credits of talent.

 

FASHION STILL IN CLUTCHES OF ELITIST HEGEMONY

High-fashion apparel in India is a relatively young micro-industry within the larger textile industry. Textile sector is the second largest employer in India after agriculture sector. Much like in agriculture, the core heart of textile sector lies in rural India and yet the fashion industry is pretty much contained within the monopoly of elite society of Delhi-Mumbai. Thousands of fashion students graduate every year in India but it’s not necessarily the talented graduates but the ones with money and dominant caste surnames who are largely welcomed & supported in the fashion industry.

Considering the costs involved in securing admission at private fashion institutions, it seems like NIFT is still the best and only bet for fashion aspirants from less-fortunate economical backgrounds in India and face the bitter music: Be extremely determined (& talented) and digest the fact that you need not necessarily be treated with the same fairness that the wealthy kids some savarna-baap-ka-naam will be treated. Dronacharyas who discriminate students on virtues of birth or wealth have corrupted institutions of knowledge in India for years, but never ever let a small mind, regardless of age or socio-economical status or position of power convince you that you don’t deserve what you worked to earn.