The Pinjra Tod campaign did bring to the spotlight important issues even if its achievements were not commensurate with the high profile nature of the campaign. | Photo: Illustration by The Hindu
Natasha Narwal is hard to reach. Those who were fellow student activists less than a decade ago have moved on to their careers and have lost touch with her. A well-known activist said Ms. Narwal could be contacted only on Signal, known to be a highly secure messaging app. She sent across her number on Signal but deleted it and said, “I can’t see a way to share her contact here. I will give you Natasha’s roommate’s number and she can put you in touch with her.” Eventually, the efforts to reach Natasha weren’t successful.
Also read: Inside hostels from Mumbai to Chennai: How biometric surveillance, curfews target female students
Natasha Narwal was in jail for more than a year a couple of years ago in connection with the CAA-NRC protests. And that possibly explains her media weariness.
Natasha, however, cut her teeth in activism with a more everyday cause — discriminatory practices in girls students hostels. Break the cage was a call to female hostel occupants, who faced the brunt of curfew timings, moral policing, and more.
Natasha Narwal and her comrades also pushed for the implementation of UGC Regulations 2015 on prevention, prohibition and redressal of sexual harassment of women employees and students in higher educational institutions, issued on May, 2, 2016. As per these regulations, they demanded functional internal sexual harassment complaints committee cells (ICCs) with democratically elected student representatives. The movement also demanded infrastructure such as street lights and safe public transport around campus areas.
They organised marches where hundreds of women turned up. A notable one was on October 3, 2016, in Delhi. The march began from LSR, through Kailash Colony, Amar Colony, and National Park — areas full of PGs in which a large number of women students from colleges such as Gargi, Kamla Nehru, Deen Dayal, and Deshbandhu lived.
The idea behind the protests in Delhi colleges soon inspired similar campaigns elsewhere. In December 2016, women students of Sree Keralavarma College, Thrissur, Kerala, started an indefinite sit-in strike, outside the locked gates of their women’s hostel, against the 4 p.m. curfew, forcing the administration to give an assurance that the timing would be extended. Women students had classes till 3.30 p.m., which meant that immediately after their classes were over, they had to rush to the hostel. This was also a hostel where women were not allowed to possess mobile phones.
In January 2018, Pinjra Tod started an online petition that would be submitted to Union Minister of Human Resource Development Prakash Javadekar, urging him to “immediately remove patriarchal and unconstitutional curfew from all women’s hostels”. At this point in time, the movement had made some headway with institutions like Mumbai University, BITS Pilani, and IIT-Roorkee that had done away with curfews.
The Delhi Commission for Women (DCW) issued notices to seven universities and colleges in December 2016 for discrimination in hostel timings for boys and girls. The move came after Pinjra Tod compiled a report on discriminatory rules and living circumstances in hostel accommodations and complained before the commission.
In 2018, a group of Panjab University students protested for 48 days, demanding round-the-clock freedom of movement for female hostel residents. They rejected the university’s initial proposal to allow limited late-night movement between 9 p.m. and 11 p.m. with conditions like logging entries and submitting applications after 11 p.m. The university eventually agreed to allow unrestricted movement, with the only condition being that students exiting hostels after 11 p.m. must log their details in a register. Till date, it stays the same.
The Pinjra Tod campaign did bring to the spotlight important issues even if its achievements were not commensurate with the high profile nature of the campaign. The social ideas that the campaign battled have shown resilience in the Indian education system. Today, we see technology behind leveraged to advance those impulses. For instance, biometric tools are being used to monitor and curb women’s movement and physical and mental space.
Published – July 19, 2025 07:08 pm IST
