Universities routinley operate a discriminatory on campus accommodation policy and should be challanged over it.

Women's rights are severely curtailed in many hostels. and women usually don't mount a legal challenge because of lack of adequate knowledge and confidence about the legal process as well as a fear of retaliation. The first is fact - takes some life experience to learn to stand up to bullies when in a vulnerable position yourself. The second is also a fact.

It is eventually going to boil down to social protests by students or a student wing of some political party taking it up aggressively and winning. This is unlikely to be ABVP given the current government's extremely regressive views about women, which complicates the matter a bit.

I believe CPI-ML had taken this up aggressively a while ago. no idea what happened of that.

I'll tell the story of my college's hostels. Men's hostel curfew time is 12 midnight. But we can roam around at any time. Ladies' hostel curfew is 9.30. And they do have to write their names and inform someone else when they'll be late, etc. But when we all friends (we are in final year now) go outside in the night the girls do go back to hostel at 11, 1, etc without any problem. They just have to lie about where they were ("coming from home" is the usual excuse).

Okay, my college is relatively relaxed about the "laws". But still there's some kind of discrimination.

Now, is this enough discrimination for creating a huge issue? No. Is there a discrimination? Yes.

The only way forward seems to be silently breaking so-called laws with everyone's consent.

Akshay, some college hostels are worse than others. For girls in particular. Even consenting adults -over 18 years of age and above need written letters from parents and what not shit. To be fair, the rest of the society is bigotted enough to perhaps vandalize a hostel if a girl came to harm there. It is a complex issue and frankly, we don't breed girls to be powerful individuals. We breed them for conformity. So the first taste of freedom also brings with it a natural recklessness that gets used as proof against them. It is complex, like I said, and will need social reform on several fronts that we aren't even trying to do, let alone come close to achieving.

And the use of the term "breed" is very deliberate - whether boys or girls, our whole idea of parenting is creating mini-me type people rather than powerful self-assured individuals.