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In March 2012, Sanjay and Sunita Ambhore received a letter from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT-B), informing them that their son Aniket, a first year-student of electrical engineering at the institute, had failed two courses.
Concerned, the Ambhores – Sanjay, a bank manager and a Dalit from Maharashtra’s Akola district and Sunita, a junior-college lecturer – met one of Aniket’s professors.
The professor told the Ambhores that Aniket, 19, who was admitted on a Scheduled Caste (SC) quota, could not cope with the IIT workload and would be happier in a “normal” engineering college (with lower standards).
The couple said the professor implied that Scheduled Caste students took up to eight years to complete a course that normally took four years. The professor suggested counselling to help Aniket focus on studies and named anti-depressants he could take.
The comments came as a shock to Sanjay and Sunita, who admitted that they were, until then, mostly unaware that such attitudes existed in higher-education institutions.
“Aniket did not find anything wrong with what he (the professor) had said, maybe because of the way it was said, as a well-meant suggestion,” Sunita Ambhore told IndiaSpend.
Like Aniket, Dalit students who are subjected to such casteist outbursts often end up feeling like they are undeserving of their admission to higher-education institutions, concluded this 2013 King’s College London study of an Indian university, now a book, Faces of Discrimination in Higher Education in India: Quota Policy, Social Justice and the Dalits.
Aniket – who scored 93 percent in his class 10 CBSE (Central Board of Secondary Education) board exam and 86 percent in his class 12 Maharashtra state board exam – possibly influenced by disparaging talk of affirmative action, told his parents that he wanted to reappear for the Joint Entrance Examination, the IIT admission test, which he cleared in 2011. He told them that he wanted to study engineering at an IIT only if he could crack the test.
Gradually, the talented Aniket (click here to hear him singing at an IIT Bombay festival) turned into a student with low self esteem.
In August 2014, a joint meeting with Aniket’s head of department and the head of the Academic Rehabilitation Programme (ARP) – a programme for academically deficient students that Aniket had been enrolled in the previous year headed by the same professor they met in 2012 – went particularly badly.
The ARP head suggested that another exam failure would devastate Aniket, so it would be best if he dropped out, joined an NGO and considered a career as a teacher.
Media reporting of Aniket’s death – such as this 6 September 2014, report in the Times of India – suggested he struggled with academics. However, the report did not mention that his parents “had repeatedly asked the head of department if there was any way of reducing the academic load on Aniket,” to quote from their 10-page testimony submitted to IIT-B after his death.
Despite asking, they were not informed about the possibility of converting the dual degree MTech programme Aniket had enrolled for, to a shorter BTech programme.
Media reporting also did not mention Aniket’s growing preoccupation with religion and spirituality – he was raised in an atheist household – as he tried to navigate academics and his SC origins.
The IIT system provides for an SC/ST adviser for the redressal of caste grievances, and there is acknowledgement that caste plays some role in the life of SC students (and tribal students, for whom an additional 7.5 percent of seats are reserved).
Questions have arisen over the efficacy of the redressal of caste grievances. Filmmaker Anoop Kumar of the 2011 documentary Death of Merit said that 80 percent of those who committed suicides in the IITs between 2007 and 2011 were Dalits, and none of these institutes had a grievance-redressal mechanism to address caste-based discrimination.
Could it have helped Aniket if there were at least some professors who shared his background? There are, for a start, very few Dalit professors in India’s 23 IITs.
In July 2016, IndiaSpend reported how affirmative action helps students from disadvantaged backgrounds get college admission.
Hover over the chart for more details. BC-A, BC-B, BC-C, BC-D refer to sub-categories A, B, C, D of Backward Caste. SC: Scheduled Caste, ST: Scheduled Tribe. (Source: American Economic Review)
A 2008 government order instructed the IITs to employ 15 percent, 7.5 percent and 27 percent SC, ST and other backward caste (OBC) faculty, respectively – in line with the quota system being implemented for student admissions since 1973 – at the entry-level post of assistant professor and lecturer in science and technology subjects and across all faculty posts in other subjects.
Almost a decade on, you can count the number of SC and ST faculty in the IITs on your fingers.
Dalit faculty made up no more than 1.12 percent of IIT faculty positions in December 2012, according to this statement made in the Lok Sabha (parliament’s lower house) that year: 0.12 percent of IIT faculty were tribals, while OBC faculty were 1.84 percent. The proportion of SCs and STs were 16.6 percent and 8.6 percent respectively, as per the 2011 census.
As on June 2015, according to an answer received by a right-to-information request by a former student, quoted in this 26 June, 2015, report in The Hindu, 2.42 percent of faculty in IIT Madras were SC or ST, based on faculty positions filled, while the similar figure for IIT Bombay was 0.34 percent.
This lack of SC/ST faculty could affect students from traditionally disadvantaged groups.
Sociologist Virginius Xaxa, professor of eminence, Tezpur University, who has studied the adverse attitude – as this commentary details – towards SC/ST students in Delhi University said:
Too few applicants: this is the overriding reason for not having enough SC/ST faculty, the directors of IIT Bombay, IIT Kanpur and IIT Madras told IndiaSpend.
Could prejudice impede the employment of faculty from disadvantaged communities?
In August 2016, the Madras High Court concluded that IIT Madras had committed “gross irregularity” in passing over associate professor WB Vasantha – a faculty member from a backward caste – for promotion in 1995, and then again in 1997, for lesser-qualified candidates.
“There is no corner of India where prejudice against Dalits doesn’t exist,” said Anand Teltumbde, senior professor, Goa Institute of Management, formerly with IIT Kharagpur.
Some of the IITs that IndiaSpend contacted for comments have started to bend the rules to increase the number of SC/ST faculty. Some are doing nothing.
Almost all the SC/ST faculty on the rolls of IIT Delhi today were hired a couple of years ago during a special recruitment drive, a senior faculty member, requesting anonymity given the sensitivity of the topic, told IndiaSpend.
IIT Madras has considered conducting a special recruitment drive for SC/ST faculty, over and above its six-monthly recruitment cycle. However, “so far, a special drive does not seem like an idea that will give us more candidates as we are constantly on the lookout for SC/ST candidates during regular recruitment”, said Bhaskar Ramamurthi, director, IIT Madras.
SC/ST applicants compete against general category applicants in regular recruitment. Does that increase the odds against them?
Manna does not think so: “SC/ST candidates would not be disadvantaged because they are treated under a separate category with a different level of expectation,” he said.
At the entry level, applicants need not possess “a superlative record”, said Manna. A doctoral degree from a “decent” university, a good academic background, some good publications and a couple of years of work experience.
“I would definitely prefer the SC/ST candidate if I had three candidates of different social status but comparable merit and qualification,” said Manna.
At a 13 December 2016, meeting of directors of the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) – India’s chain of prestigious management institutions, where too the government has urged faculty quotas – to discuss ways to increase faculty from traditionally disadvantaged communities, the IIM Kashipur representative described special fellow programme in management for SC/ST doctoral students, who will simultaneously be trained for faculty positions.
Asked whether he could consider absorbing his institute’s own fresh SC/ST/OBC doctorates as junior faculty, Manna said:
Instead, he suggested that the government take on the training of SC/ST doctorates with potential, with the intention of bringing them up to the IIT standard.
IIT Madras has relaxed the prevention-of-inbreeding condition for SC/ST doctoral scholars. “But like our PhD scholars from the general category, our graduating SC/ST scholars often join other centrally funded technical institutes, national laboratories, industry, foreign universities, etc.,” said Ramamurthi.
Improving the learning environment and training potential candidates in-house would likely help retain more SC/ST doctoral scholars.
“Students aware of the environment in the IITs may be reluctant to join as faculty,” said Tezpur University’s Xaxa “Academic progress depends greatly on how comfortable you feel in an environment.” Aniket, clearly, did not.
(Bahri is a freelance writer and editor based in Mount Abu, Rajasthan.)
(This article was first published in IndiaSpend.)
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