Students on campuses, especially of residential business and engineering colleges, are indulging their voyeurism online, but are not apologetic. Pornography doesn’t spark moral debates among them. Nirav Joshi, a management student at SP Jain, Mumbai, defends his peers: “Most students are in the age group of 20-30 and are curious. Like young people anywhere, we are no exception. We do surf porn!” Girls are also aware and either support porn surfing or are indifferent to it. Says Nidhi Sharma of IIM-C, “If guys are not allowed to surf porn, they will just get desperate!” Many students, however, admit that the novelty wears off after a few days.

Students have voted for a 'porn secretary' in some IIMs and IITs. Elected for each hostel, after fierce competition, the secretary’s job is to provide students with access to the porn library of jpegs, mpegs and gifs, passwords to x-rated sites and in some instances, porn movies stored on PCs.

At other colleges, a simple search using the ‘find’ option in PCs yields interesting results. “Simply type *.jpg, or *.mpg in any PC and you will be surprised at what you get. Or walk around in the college lab or dorm and you will know who specialises in what!” says Anayak.

But pornography is not confined to the campus. Most students spend hours compressing files and storing them on the web for future use. Says former IIM-Ahemdabad student Salil Kachha, “It’s a popular rite before passing out. When leaving the institute, most students take backups of not only their study material, but all their porn stuff too. In fact, some even backup their favourite videos!”

Many funny anecdotes find their way into annual books. “One of my classmates was nicknamed ‘dil’ (for dildo),’’ recalls Kachha. “The funny thing was that girls didn’t know what it stood for, and they too would call him dil.”

Porn surfing today is an open secret. Students say their files lie on shared networks that are accessible to teachers as well. If the teachers tried, they would be able to find it. But, students say, most turn a blind eye to the proceedings. Says Anayak, “Many professors in business schools know about it, but don’t make a fuss. They expect us to be responsible enough, and assume that the workload and pressure would leave no time for porn.”

Even if there are rules, students find ways to break them. For instance, though most campuses have a system of filters, students use sites like Anonymizer to surf or get access to porn. In fact, it takes days or even weeks of hectic downloading before the systems actually detect the activity.

Though administrators and college authorities argue that it’s impossible to play watchman, some colleges have cleaned up their act. After their Web site was defaced and hacked, IIM Lucknow put together a security policy to filter offensive sites and words in emails. It has achieved a degree of success. However, students caught surfing porn are not penalised.

Explains Professor Sridhar, IT Department: “We’ve made a presentation about the security policy to our student representatives who help us to curb Net misuse, but are yet to make these guidelines known to other students.”

XLRI Jamshedpur gets its own students to watch over the rest. Ex-student Geeta Rajagopalan says, “There were restrictions on objectionable sites and frequent mail checks and crackdowns on people using a lot of space for pictures. Those caught faced strict action by Socrates, the student committee in charge of Net access and the computer lab.”

Some time ago, SP Jain authorities installed software that would block certain keywords and offensive sites. However, students say, it was subsequently removed, since they didn’t find it to be of much use.

The fact is that as long as colleges remain wired, and as long as there is porn on the net, filters or not, students will find a way to get their fix.

{Names have been changed to protect the identity of students}

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