Arshee Khosla, a pretty 19-year-old economics student, looks anxious as she approaches her Delhi University campus. More unsettling to her than first-day nerves is the line of khaki-clad police who stand guard at the gate. They are there to prevent "ragging", the bullying meted out to first-year undergraduates by older students in universities across India. Around the gates, alongside invitations to join myriad extra-curricular societies, posters declaim that "An Act of Ragging May Land You in Jail".rnInitiation rites for new students occur in universities all over the world. Sometimes, they get out of hand. But in India, where ragging might involve forcing "fachchas", as freshers are known, to perform racy Bollywood dance routines before crowds, it has so often tended towards violent bullying that the government is trying to stamp it out altogether. In March an 18-year-old medical student, Aman Kachroo, was beaten to death by third-year students in the northern state of Himachal Pradesh during a ragging ceremony. According to the Coalition to Uproot Ragging from Education (cure), an ngo, his was the twelfth death caused by ragging in the past year, a tally that includes suicides.
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