The IITs have a long history of systematically othering Dalit students - The Print

The IITs have a long history of systematically othering Dalit students 

The toxic belief that ‘quota students’ are innately less able than ‘mainstream students’ is at the heart of this caste-based exclusion.

YASHICA DUTT Updated: 17 February, 2019 1:24 pm IST

A poster protesting the death of Rohith Vemula | Simrin Sirur/ThePrint

All these universities seem to be following the same playbook on how to exclude Dalits. The academic performance of the students seems to be less important than their lower caste status. Ragging, institutional bullying and lack of support for Dalit students causes many of them to commit suicide, and discourages other Dalits from applying to these important centres of learning, leading them to be excluded from these fields. This sends a clear signal to young Dalit aspirants that these prestigious colleges have no place for them, regardless of what the reservation policy dictates. The toxic belief that ‘quota students’ are innately less able or talented than ‘mainstream students’ is at the heart of this exclusion.

The IIT-JEE exam, which aims to test a student’s aptitude for engineering, is not only tough but also vastly different from the central or state board exams that high school students clear in school. The problems challenge logic and theory in a way that makes it almost impossible for anyone who is unfamiliar with its ‘code’ to solve them. The coaching institutes, including the one that I attended, teach the patterns, codes and techniques to finish the examination paper in three hours. About 82 per cent of Indian students either take additional coaching for IIT-JEE and other science-based competitive exams at the numerous coaching institutes that dot every small and big town or directly go to Kota, Rajasthan, to study at one of the 150 ‘cram schools’, which pretty much guarantee you a spot on the list if you are admitted and follow their instructions. Even local coaching is expensive, costing about Rs 2,000-3,000 per month nearly sixteen years ago in 2001- 03 when I took these classes. 

The fees for the Kota schools can go up to Rs 1 lakh a month, which doesn’t include the cost of living—making it prohibitively expensive for students from marginalized backgrounds. It’s not that students can’t clear these exams without coaching; many SC/ST students in fact do, but since they come from marginalized backgrounds, they lack other support structures. 

That, along with their government school education, often leads many SC/ST/OBC students to drop out or be expelled for low grades. In 2015, 90 per cent of the students that IIT Roorkee dismissed on account of low grades were SC/ST/OBC. Added to this is the distress, discrimination and systemic failure that ‘quota students’ face at these prestigious institutions. Nearly 80 per cent of student suicides in IITs till 2011 were of Dalit students.

IIT students have a long history of opposing constitutional reservation and several members of YFE in 2006 were from its various colleges. Many used the IIT Roorkee dropouts incident to argue that ‘quota students’ are inherently talentless and don’t belong in the colleges, instead of examining the conditions that led to their dropping out. IITs across the country admit a disproportionately high number of upper-caste students in the general category, which Harvard-based anthropologist Ajantha Subramanian argues isn’t as casteless or ‘meritorious’ as it seems. Using IIT Madras as a case study, she examines how when the number of European engineers in India decreased at the beginning of the twentieth century, Tamil Brahmins were the single largest group in Madras Presidency to replace them. They also filled over 70 per cent seats in regional engineering institutes despite forming only 3 per cent of the population, and were disproportionately represented in most modern professions along with other upper castes. At IIT Madras, not only the students but also the faculty are overwhelmingly upper caste, with 464 professors drawn from the ‘general category’, 59 OBCs, 11 SCs, and 2 STs. She argues that association of ‘general category’ with merit is biased because the students from that category are assumed to be upper caste. During her interviews with several former IIT students, she discovered that many believed that while general category students got bad grades because they were ‘having fun’, reserved category students simply didn’t have the intellectual capability to do well. Unsurprisingly, the administration supports that idea, especially former director P. V. Indiresan who believed that ‘the talented’ upper castes deserved ‘rights of their own’ compared to the ‘socially deprived’ who demanded special privileges.

The idea that upper castes are inherently ‘talented’ while the reserved category SC/ST/OBC students are meritless is as hollow as it is casteist. In an anonymous study on the state of female Dalit students in a prestigious Indian university, PhD candidates and research fellows complained that they were discouraged from applying to the generous Rajiv Gandhi National Fellowship for SC/ST students. They were told that they didn’t ‘deserve free fellowships’. And the faculty impose their casteist ideas in the universities in many ways. The University of Hyderabad’s ‘Brahmin well’ which was dug in the 1980s for Professor V. Kannan is a ridiculous example of that. Kannan only allowed other upper-caste students and professors to access it and lower-caste students and faculty couldn’t come anywhere near it till he retired in 2014. Upper-caste professors not only discriminate against their lower-caste colleagues but also question their ‘merit’ and their right to their careers. Professor Vasant Tarade, a former principal of Mumbai’s Sydenham College, recalled that a Brahmin professor refused to use his chair after he retired.

Years of being accused of caste-based discrimination have had some impact and institutes have created some systems to support the reserved category students. The AIIMS website informs us that the campus has a SC/ST grievance cell, while Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) has a personalized academic support system and the IITs have English language classes to help students from vernacular language backgrounds. Yet, as Professor Thorat notes, these institutes ‘lack the will to implement them in full’. Universities and colleges should be centres for learning new ideas and questioning the status quo. Instead, they become places of discrimination, exclusion and institutional harassment. Young minds are bred with hate, ready to assert their caste hierarchy over the next generation. Students are not taught why reservation is essential for those from the lower castes, who have been excluded from education, art, culture and even owning property, to reach a somewhat level playing field. Without reservation, Dalits will remain on the fringes, unable to access even the most basic opportunities.

This excerpt was taken with permission from the book ‘Coming Out as Dalit: A Memoir’ by Yashica Dutt. It was published by Aleph.

If IITs had more Dalit professors, would Aniket Ambhore be alive - Economic Times

If IITs had more Dalit professors, would Aniket Ambhore be alive?

By IANS | Updated: Jan 17, 2017, 03.45 PM IST

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Some of the IITs that IndiaSpend contacted for comments have started to bend the rules to increase the number of SC/ST faculty.

By Charu Bahri 

In March 2012, Sanjay and Sunita Ambhore, parents of Aniket Ambhore, 19, a first-year electrical engineering student at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT-B), received a letter informing them that their son — admitted in the Scheduled Caste (SC) quota — had failed two courses. 

Concerned, the Ambhores — Sanjay, a bank manager, is a Dalit; Sunita, a junior-college lecturer, is not — met one of Aniket's professors, who told them their son could not cope with IIT workload and would be happy in "normal" engineering colleges (with lower standards). He implied, they said, that SC 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 were a shock to Sanjay and Sunita, they said, who were until then mostly unaware that such attitudes existed in higher-education institutions. However, "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 told IndiaSpend. 

Instead, Aniket — who scored 86 per cent in his class 12 Maharashtra State Board exam — possibly influenced by disparaging talk of affirmative action, told his parents that he wanted to re-appear for the Joint Entrance Examination, the IIT admission test, which he cleared in 2011 — and study engineering only if he could crack the test without affirmative action. 

Between then and August 2014, the Ambhores consulted three psychiatrists to help their son regain confidence. It made no difference. Gradually, the talented Aniket 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. 

On September 4, 2014, Aniket fell to his death from the sixth floor of an IIT-B hostel. It isn't clear if it was an accident or he jumped. 

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 per cent of seats are reserved). 

"Some caste bias does shows up on campus, mostly as upper-caste students expressing their discontent with the reservation system," Devang Khakhar, Director, IIT Bombay, told IndiaSpend. 

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 per cent 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. 

Sunita now wonders if Aniket's downward turn began when he stepped into IIT-B as a Dalit, within months believing his academic woes were a result of his inability to reconcile with his origins. This left him with the belief that he was undeserving of a seat at India's premier engineering college — an attitude confirmed by a 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". 

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. 

The quota system policy was designed in the 1950s as an early form of affirmative action to ensure that higher education institutions retained 15 per cent of their places for Dalit students; the same proportion of faculty was also expected to come from this background. 

A 2008 government order instructed the IITs to employ 15 per cent, 7.5 per cent and 27 per cent 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 per cent of IIT faculty positions in December 2012; 0.12 per cent were tribals, while OBC faculty were 1.84 per cent. 

The proportion of SCs and STs in the country's population were 16.6 per cent and 8.6 per cent, respectively, as per the 2011 census. 

This lack of SC/ST faculty could affect students from traditionally disadvantaged groups. 

"Considerate and supportive faculty who are genuinely sympathetic to student's problems are few," said sociologist Virginius Xaxa, professor of eminence, Tezpur University, who has studied the adverse attitude towards SC/ST students in Delhi University. "The pervasive attitude is that students coming through quotas are undeserving." 

Why do IITs lack SC/ST/OBC faculty? Too few applicants: That is the overriding reason for not having enough SC/ST faculty, the directors of IIT Bombay, IIT Kanpur and IIT Madras told IndiaSpend. 

"We receive too few good-quality applications from SC/ST candidates who meet the minimum threshold for an IIT faculty," said Indranil Manna, Director, IIT Kanpur. "While we are committed to the law and our social obligation, we are also keen to protect the IIT brand, a globally recognised Indian brand that has taken 50 years to build." 

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 W.B. 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, and grandson of B.R. Ambedkar, the writer of India's Constitution. 

"India has reconciled itself to admitting Dalit students in the IITs, but resistance to admitting Dalit faculty is still very strong, a Dalit must expect to fight the system." 

Some of the IITs that IndiaSpend contacted for comments have started to bend the rules to increase the number of SC/ST faculty. 

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. 

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. 

(In arrangement with IndiaSpend.org, a data-driven, non-profit, public interest journalism platform. Charu Bahri is a freelance writer and editor based in Mount Abu, Rajasthan. The views expressed are those of IndiaSpend.)