Harassment of Dalit professor in IIT Kanpur exemplifies the subtle ways of caste discrimination in India today - First Post

Harassment of Dalit professor in IIT Kanpur exemplifies the subtle ways of caste discrimination in India today

India Sandip Roy Apr 04, 2018 14:22:02 IST

It’s not as brutally dramatic as a headline about a Dalit youth killed for riding a horse. Or that story about Dalit men flayed for skinning a dead cow. Or a Dalit student, dubbed “casteist, extremist and anti-national” by a Union minister, killing himself and leaving behind a five-page suicide note. At a time when angry Dalit protests during a Bharat Bandh have erupted across many states in India, the back and forth debate in one university, couched in the carefully formal language of fact finding commissions and letters to the director, sounds almost innocuous, not the kind of stuff that leaves buses torched and people dead.

But the story of one Dalit professor and what he faced in one of the premier educational institutions of the country shows how pernicious the problem of discrimination can be.

On 1 January, 2018, Dr Subrahmanyam Saderla joined the aerospace department of IIT Kanpur. He had a job offer in South Korea but he chose Kanpur. “I joined the institute with high spirit,” wrote Saderla in a letter to the director.

However, it quickly turned sour. In his letter, Saderla complained that when he was called for a faculty seminar, some of the professors present, including Professor Ishan Sharma, “kept on ridiculing me for the entire talk” and no one present tried to intervene.  He said he felt “ridiculed, harassed and undignified.”

File image of IIT Kanpur campus. 

Image courtesy: www.iitk.ac.in

He said he discovered that some senior faculty members had a three hour-long meeting to discuss lapses in the recruitment process, to make the case that he was not up to the mark as a faculty candidate. He alleged a rumour was spread that he was not mentally fit to take up the job. Emails were sent to various members of the IIT Kanpur community and senators questioning his academic credentials. At a department get together, he heard sarcastic comments about how the new faculty was lowering the standards of the department. He heard that at a dinner party at home, one of the professors dissed him.

An email sent to the senators of IIT Kanpur by Professor Rajiv Shekhar minced no words. It was headlined “The Ten Year Curse Strikes Again” and described Saderla’s appointment as an incident which “shakes the foundation of academics at IITK”.  He complained about the process followed, about Saderla’s grades, about his seminar performance. “How then did the candidate slip under the radar?” he asked.

It's one thing to have concerns about a candidate’s qualifications or an appointment process before they are hired. But a newly-appointed faculty member facing something like this seems not too different from a high level version of ragging.

But is it about caste?

IIT Kanpur set up a fact-finding committee to probe the allegations chaired by Vinay Pathak, vice chancellor of Dr APJ Abdul Kalam Technical University in Lucknow.

The responses are striking. Professor Ishan Sharma denied he had tried to ridicule Saderla and said he had the right to go to any seminar and ask any question he wished. Professor PM Mohite in the department said he did not know the matter had anything to do with caste at all. His issues were about the process followed in the selection. Professor Sanjay Mittal, one of the professors named in the complaint as having told a departmental get-together that standards were going down after the new hire, denied even knowing that Saderla belonged to the SC/ST category.

That’s odd, because Saderla was in fact selected through a special drive for the reserved category and that seems to rankle with many in the first place. The fact-finding committee said explicitly that Dr Sharma, for instance, appeared to have “ill feeling against special drive of recruitment and in particular against Dr Saderla.”

Professor R Shekhar, who sent the “curse” email to all the senators of IIT Kanpur, denied he was against any special drive for recruitment. Shekhar has now been appointed director of IIT Dhanbad. Professor CS Upadhyay, who sent an email to the chairman of the board of governors, describing himself as a “stalwart of IIT Kanpur”, insisted Saderla’s academic performance was poor. Saderla had a CPI of 7.25 and IIT’s own definition of first class CPI is 7.0.

Saderla is not without support. The head of the department, AK Ghosh told the committee that some professors had joined together to harass Saderla, who he said “if given a chance, will be the best Flight Mechanics person in the country.” Professor Ashish Tewari said the allegations of discrimination needed to be taken seriously. The committee which selected Saderla said there was no dissent in his selection and all procedures were followed correctly.

The fact-finding committee agreed and recommended the management take “suitable action keeping in view of SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act 1989”, the very act in the eye of the current national storm. A charge sheet is being prepared and an enquiry committee is supposed to be formed after that.

But sources within IIT say an attempt is being made to paint this as a simple “misunderstanding”. An “apology” letter has been issued, claiming that “some of our attempts to uphold the academic process of the institute have been misunderstood and misconstrued.” It claims the whole incident caused those accused of harassment “immense pain and distress” as if they are equally the victims here. A signature campaign commenced, in the name of “protecting the future of the Institute”, to resolve the issue by dialogue between the two parties.

Well-meaning as it sounds, it completely fails to take into account the enormous power imbalance at play here. A newly-appointed assistant professor finds himself pitted against the reputation of an entire IIT, his allegation described as “completely out of character with the way the Institute and its faculty has functioned in all its years of existence.” The pressure to back down for the “good of the university” can only be imagined.

Moreover, caste is being swept under the carpet which leads to the question whether caste discrimination can only exist if anti-caste epithets are explicitly flung around.

Now, the SC Commission has taken note of this and summoned all parties to Delhi on 10 April.  Whatever happens there, one thing is clear.  Many of us live under the illusion that we are caste-blind now, especially in the professional world because that illusion suits us. Yet, as a recent survey of caste in the United States pointed out, one in three Dalits reported being discriminated against during their education and two out of three reported being treated unfairly in the workplace. The story of Dr Subrahmanyam Saderla reminds us how much more insidious and deep-rooted our caste problem is than most of us care to admit.

Saderla at least felt strong enough to protest formally. Many others would rather swallow the humiliation than take on the system.  Perhaps that’s what Saderla has in mind as he writes in his letter to the director, “I kindly request you to take appropriate action such that no new faculty should ever face such embarrassing and humiliating situation in the future.”

Published Date: Apr 04, 2018 14:22 PM | Updated Date: Apr 04, 2018 14:22 PM

Tags : #Caste Discrimination #Casteism #CriticalPoint #Dalit Professor #Dalits #Education #IIT Kanpur #India

Success and suicides: The two sides of the IIT-JEE story reflect the failure of the education system - Scroll.In

Success and suicides: The two sides of the IIT-JEE story reflect the failure of the education system

The competitive exam system and the coaching industry demand extraordinary capacities of mechanical learning.

Yesterday · 10:30 am.  

Sanjay Srivastava

At this time of the year (April-May), national newspapers are full of front-page news and full-page advertisements of young women and men who have cracked the Joint Entrance Examination-Main, the test that qualifies students to take admission in a variety of technical institutions. It is also the pathway to appearing for the JEE-Advanced examination for admission to the Indian Institutes of Technology. Major coaching institutes, mostly headquartered in that surreal Rajasthan city of Kota, exhibit photographs of their star students – confident posture, unwavering gaze, uniform attire – in these advertisements. Their “All India Ranks” adorn the publicity material as concrete proof of both their own worthiness and that of the coaching institute. Among all this, there are two JEE-linked individual stories this year – one signifying spectacular success and the other of colossal failure – that provide necessary insight into the tragedy of our educational system. Tragedy has become so much the norm that we may not think of it as such.

First, the celebrations of success. In a deeply asymmetrical society, it is perhaps natural that we rejoice in the against-all-odds performance of a 17-year-old Dalit boy from Udaipur who achieved a perfect score in the examination. Kalpit Veerwal’s father is a medical compounder and his mother is a teacher in a government school. Veerwal is reported as saying that he started preparing for the examination when he was in Class 8, studying up to seven hours a day and mainly using the internet to gather information. He joined the Udaipur branch of one of Kota’s best known coaching institutes and is now preparing for the JEE-Advanced examination. There are many social media posts congratulating the young man. Most speak of the extraordinary nature of his success, given his social background. Some speak of it as a challenge to upper-caste monopoly over knowledge systems and material progress.

You might have missed the other JEE-related story that appeared immediately after the media coverage of Kalpit Veerwal. It was not on the front page of any newspaper. This was about a student from West Bengal who had been undergoing coaching in Kota but committed suicide as he failed to qualify for the 2017 JEE-Mains. His name was Ajit Pramanick. Though Pramanick’s life-blood simply bled into the back-page newspaper ink, his death tells us something about the end of education itself. Individual successes within our education system – if it is that – provide very little indication of the wider miseries it produces, both in terms of individual tragedies and the tragedy of the education system itself. Of course, the two are connected.

Killing fields of Kota

According to one newspaper report, Kota Police data indicates that 72 students from the city committed suicide between 2011 and 2015. The competitive examinations system and its auxiliary, the massive (and massively lucrative) coaching industry, are part of a broader educational landscape where rote-learning forms the basis of success and failure. These are the killing fields of education in more ways than one. They demand extraordinary capacities of mechanical learning, which have little relation to creative thinking that provides solutions – scientific, technical, social – to societal problems. This is not an individual failure of the imagination, for everyone seeks to better themselves through their own circumstance. Rather, it is a policy failure: the death of public imagination that can create a social-useful but also individually hopeful educational system. And, one that is able to engineer multiple ways of nurturing human capacities. The many hundred-thousands of young men and women who throng Kota each year are only promised dead end solutions on both these counts. Ajit Pramanick’s suicide is a personal tragedy for his family but it is also a form of social suicide for a society that so wholeheartedly endorses the idea of educational success that underlies his death.

There are, we know, multiple actors in this personal and social tragedy, for suicides have both personal and social lineages. It is a tragedy scripted by national and multinational corporations with substantial investments in the examinations business, as well as the state that creates and maintains the grounds for it. Between private profiteering and public inaction lies an entire population of young people forever marked as failures because of their ineptitude at mechanical learning. It is rarely that private investment is made for the purposes of furthering social good (if that happens, it is usually a byproduct), but when state policy is unable to identify it, we are truly in an educational abyss. Given the manner in which state policy has wilfully allowed education to be so narrowly interpreted, is it any wonder that our universities are research institutes – while part of one of the largest systems in the world – that hardly produce cutting-edge research or innovative solutions to social problems?

Frequently, there are references to the coaching and examinations ecosystem as a grotesque caricature of education, and hence not the actual system. Unfortunately, the gap between the actual system and that represented by its supposed caricature is not as wide as we might think. The actual is now barely distinguishable from its apparently distorted image. The monstrosity of our thinking might be gauged by the normalised tones of media reporting on Ajit Pramanick’s suicide. His parents, one report noted, were scheduled to arrive to pick up their son’s body. As the minuscule numbers of the successful gazed at us from newspaper front pages, a representative of the massive platoon of failures was banished to the anonymity of a single column many pages beyond. There was discarding of human potential and there was blood. But the blood is seeping through the entire body politic.

We welcome your comments at letters@scroll.in.

CASTE DISCRIMINATION Could having more Dalit professors increase sensitivity to scheduled caste students at IITs? - Scroll.In

CASTE DISCRIMINATION

Could having more Dalit professors increase sensitivity to scheduled caste students at IITs?

Deaths like that of Aniket Ambhore, a Dalit student, who is suspected to have committed suicide in 2014, could be avoided in a more understanding environment.

Image credit:  Via Facebook.com/Anurag Mundhada

Yesterday · 09:30 pm  

Charu Bahri, IndiaSpend.com

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, received a letter informing them that their son – admitted on a scheduled caste quota – had failed two courses.

Concerned, the Ambhores – Sanjay, a bank manager, is a Dalit from Akola district in Maharashtra, 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 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 were a shock to Sanjay and Sunita, they said, who were until then mostly unaware that such attitudes existed in higher-education institutions.

Some high-caste professors consider Dalit students “uneducable”, wrote educationist Kurmana Simha Chalam in an 2007 book, Challenges of Higher Education.

Reflected in Aniket’s response to his professor’s outburst, casteist expression can leave Dalit students feeling that 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 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 93% in his Class 10 Central Board of Secondary Education exam and 86% 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 – and study engineering at an IIT 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 (here’s a video of 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 – 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 programme head suggested that another exam failure would devastate Aniket, so it would be best if he dropped out, perhaps joined an NGO and considered a career as a teacher.

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.

‘Some bias on campus’

Media reporting of Aniket’s death – such as this September 6, 2014, report in the Times of India – suggested that he struggled with academics, but did not mention that his parents “had repeatedly asked the HoD (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-Bombay after his death.

Despite this, they were not informed about the possibility of converting the dual degree M Tech programme Aniket was enrolled for to a shorter B Tech programme.

Aniket’s death was described as an accident and reporting included comments from unnamed friends that he did not appear to be “anybody who would commit suicide”.

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 scheduled caste origins.

The IIT system provides for an scheduled caste/scheduled tribe adviser for the redressal of caste grievances, and there is acknowledgement that caste plays some role in the life of Dalit students (and tribal students, for whom an additional 7.5% 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 of IIT Bombay, told IndiaSpend.

Questions have been raised over the efficacy of the redressal of caste grievances. Filmmaker Anoop Kumar of the 2011 documentary Death of Merit said that 80% 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 Ambhore 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 the King’s College London study.

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.

1.1% of IIT faculty is Dalit

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

–Faces of Discrimination in Higher Education in India: Quota Policy, Social Justice and the Dalits

In July 2016, IndiaSpend reported how affirmative action helps students from disadvantaged backgrounds get college admission.

Source: American Economic ReviewHover 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.

A 2008 government order instructed the IITs to employ 15%, 7.5% and 27% scheduled caste, scheduled tribes and other backward caste 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% of IIT faculty positions in December 2012, according to this statement made in the Lok Sabha (parliament’s lower house) that year: 0.12% of IIT faculty were tribals, while OBC faculty were 1.84%. The proportion of SCs and STs were 16.6% and 8.6% respectively, as per the 2011 census.

Source: Lok Sabha; *Based on the sanctioned strength of 5,706

As on June 2015, according to an answer received by a right-to-information request by a former student, quoted in this June 26, 2015, report in The Hindu, 2.42% of faculty in IIT Madras were SC or ST, based on faculty positions filled, while the similar figure for IIT Bombay was 0.34%.

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–as this commentary details–towards SC/ST students in Delhi University.

“The pervasive attitude,” said Xaxa, “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 have very few scheduled caste faculty because we receive too few applicants from this category,” said IIT Bombay’s Khakhar.

“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 fifty 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 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.

“It took the public sector many years to overcome resistance to employ dalits at managerial levels,” said Teltumbde, the grandson of BR 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 IITs are bending rules to increase SC/ST faculty, others do nothing

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.

“We have not taken any specific measures to increase the number of faculty members belonging to the scheduled castes,” said Khakhar.

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.

IIT Kanpur’s Manna sees rolling advertisement on the website as a better option to recruit SC/ST faculty than a separate, one-time recruitment drive. “A drive would only provide access to talent existing at a given point of time,” he said.

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, who added that IIT Kanpur would only relax the work-experience requirement for an “exceptional” SC/ST doctoral candidate and “appoint such a candidate on a contractual basis with scope for regularisation in due course”.

“We relax the age and work experience norms for OBC/SC/ST candidates to ensure more candidates from among those who apply are called for interview,” said IIT Madras’s Ramamurthi. “We also ensure representation from reserved categories in the selection committee when we have OBC/SC/ST applicants. They make allowance for skills which can be picked up with experience.”

Improve the learning environment, offer training to increase SC/ST faculty

At a December 13, 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: “The IITs follow a strict policy on preventing inbreeding. We would prefer that our doctorates work away for a few years, then return to us if they are interested.”

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.

“It isn’t enough to legislate and require IITs to employ a certain number of SC/ST faculty,” he said. “Surely a group of 100 SC/ST entry-level faculties can be created to start with?”

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.

This article first appeared on IndiaSpend, a data-driven and public-interest journalism non-profit.

We welcome your comments at letters@scroll.in.