A recent report published in The Indian Express revealed that there has been a significant shift of Muslim students from government colleges to private pre-university colleges (PUCs) in Udupi district, which was the hotbed of the hijab protests in 2022.
In 2022-23, the enrolment of Muslim students in government PUCs has dropped by half, including that of Muslim boys (from 210 to 95), while Muslim girls’ enrollment has dropped from 178 to 91 in PUCs in 2022-23. There has been a simultaneous offsetting of this drop by the increase in enrolment in private PUCs. These are worrying numbers but perhaps unsurprising.
They also reveal a great deal about the educational choices that marginalized Muslim students and their parents were forced to make in the light of a binary they never wanted to deal with – education or faith — and the binary the state should never have put before them: The right to education or the right to religious freedom.
The side effects of the hijab ban have pushed students out of government institutions, towards private institutions they can often barely afford.
