Caste discrimination in university campuses

Strap:

The Supreme Court’s directive asking the University Grants Commission (UGC) to notify within six weeks new regulations to combat caste-based discrimination and suicides in higher education institutions has come not a moment too soon. Since the tragic suicide of the University of Hyderabad doctoral student Rohith Vemula amid allegations of caste-based bias by the campus authorities in January 2016, it has been painfully clear that despite their lofty goals, India’s premier campuses are riven by persistent discriminatory attitudes that hurt young students from marginalised communities. At a time when young people from diverse backgrounds are entering universities in numbers larger than ever before, the bias hurts not just individual but collective and national progress.

Over the past few decades, higher educational institutions have grown in number and stature, and the importance of a higher-education degree has zoomed. Unfortunately, this expansion has not prompted an expulsion of discriminatory attitudes among a section of the student group, professors and administration staff. Students from poorer families, marginalised castes and first-generation learner backgrounds often find it difficult to survive on campuses — not only because they fail to get adequate help but also due to hostility. The death of medical student Payal Tadvi in 2019 due to caste-based bullying by her peers in a Maharashtra medical college was a testament to the fact that bias cannot be removed by short-term responses or stop-gap solutions.

Can the regulations work? A lot will depend on systematic and thoughtful implementation. The top court is right in stressing that the rules must be more than symbolic gestures and also in asserting that the judges would scrutinise the practical effectiveness of rules that the higher education regulator started drafting in 2023 but has not yet put into action. It was only fitting that the mothers of Vemula and Tadvi were the main petitioners in the case. The least our education system can ensure is their tragedies are not repeated.

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