Editorial: Let's get to know our prejudices

At long last, India’s policymakers are getting down to the task of assessing what students from vulnerable sections of society experience in our educational system. At the prodding of the Supreme Court, the University Grants Commission (UGC) is undertaking a needs assessment for the mentorship of students coming to campuses from underprivileged sections. Based on the findings of this assessment, Niti Aayog will develop a mentorship framework to be followed by higher educational institutions, including IITs and IIMs.

Questionnaires are being administered to students to assess their aspirations, self-perception of academic performance, their experience of social life on campus and their expectations from mentors. The survey, hopefully, will capture the nuances of how caste-based discrimination is experienced by students from SCs, ST and OBC communities. More importantly, appraisers of the findings must address campus social discrimination more squarely than they have done in the past. All too often, such assessments have been left to members of faculty, who are invariably from privileged sections, resulting in inaccurate inferences and flawed remedies. A systematic study of students’ own perceptions is likely to be altogether more useful.

This initiative comes at the urging of the Supreme Court, which last week gave UGC eight weeks to generate norms on tackling caste prejudice on campuses and incorporate them into the draft University Grants Commission (Promotion of Equity in Higher Education Institutions) Regulations, 2025. The apex court issued the directive after hearing a petition filed by the mothers of Rohith Vemula and Payal Tadvi, both students who died by suicide after facing caste-based prejudice.

The mothers contend that caste discrimination is rampant on Indian campuses and that their children were victims of it. Data from multiple recent studies and government sources illustrate its severity and persistent nature. Between 2014 and 2021, 122 student suicides were recorded at IITs, IIMs, NITs, and central universities; 68 of these students were from reserved categories. In just the past 14 months, courts have noted 18 suicides occurring in higher education institutions that were directly linked to caste discrimination. Since 2018, the IITs alone have reported 33 suicides due to caste issues.

Suicide is only the extreme manifestation of this phenomenon. Caste discrimination exerts itself through multiple other forms: social exclusion, unfair grading, social isolation, denial of opportunities, and delayed scholarship disbursal, being just a few. Between 2018 and 2023, there were over 19,000 SC/ST/OBC dropouts from central universities, IITs, and IIMs. Applicants from disadvantaged social groups have to contend with a high rate of refusal of internships and need to send 20% more resumes to get the same rate of callbacks as high-caste applicants.

Then this is the usual complex of harassment, exclusion and isolation exerted by peers and faculty, which tends to be heavily upper caste. A 2020 IIT Delhi study found that 75% of students from marginalised castes faced caste-based remarks.

Caste discrimination on campuses is as old as Indian education. Only UGC and university managements have been late to wake up to it. Correctives have been archaic, feeble or poorly informed. The present survey is just one step towards plugging the information gap policymakers have so far papered over, imagining that good intent is sufficient to bridge an age-old chasm. Hopefully, it will be the first of many exercises to gauge the depth of our prejudices.