IIT Bombay’s Reputation at Stake: Caste, Merit and the Unfinished Promise of Equality

— ✍️Dr. Pankaj Tambe

An institution’s reputation depends on the confidence it inspires among those with the least power within it. For IIT Bombay, the crisis following the death of student Sahil Wakode has brought that principle into sharp focus. Research achievements, distinguished alumni and international recognition cannot resolve questions about whether students experience the campus as a place of dignity, fairness and belonging.

On September 21, 2026, media reported that IIT Bombay had suspended Professor Suryanarayana Doolla’s deanship and apologised for its earlier communication concerning Wakode’s death. Doolla was serving as Dean of Administrative Affairs, having previously held the Student Affairs portfolio. His parents’ allegations of caste discrimination formed part of the police case. These allegations remain subject to investigation; the registration of an FIR does not establish guilt.

The distinction between allegation and established fact is indispensable. Equally, an unresolved criminal investigation cannot require society to suspend examination of institutional practices. Determining individual responsibility and assessing the adequacy of student safeguards are related but distinct tasks.

The reported intervention of IIT Bombay’s Faculty Forum, which supported Doolla and maintained that he had acted according to institutional rules, illustrates the competing claims now confronting the institution. Faculty members have every right to demand due process. Their position must be considered alongside the family’s allegations and students’ concerns, without treating professional solidarity as a substitute for independent findings.

A credible institution applies the same evidentiary discipline to everyone. It protects an accused teacher against premature condemnation and a deceased student against an official narrative that the student can no longer contest. Its public communications should acknowledge uncertainty wherever the investigation remains incomplete.

The wider issue concerns a recurring tension within elite education: admission offers formal membership, but it does not necessarily confer an equal sense of belonging. For students from Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, the question is whether an institution recognises them as full participants in its intellectual life or continually makes their presence subject to explanation.

That question has a history.

The IITs occupy a powerful place in India’s understanding of merit. Their entrance examinations are widely regarded as instruments through which individual ability can overcome social circumstances. Yet examination performance also reflects access to schooling, coaching, language training, financial security and time to prepare. Recognising those conditions does not diminish a successful candidate’s effort. It makes the explanation of success more complete.

Anthropologist Ajantha Subramanian’s The Caste of Merit: Engineering Education in India examines how technical education and caste privilege have interacted in modern India. Drawing particularly on IIT Madras, her work explores how inherited social advantages can become understood as exclusively individual accomplishments. Her earlier article, “Making Merit”, similarly examines the transformation of caste advantage into professional distinction. This scholarship challenges the assumption that technical institutions become socially neutral simply because they employ competitive examinations.

An important asymmetry follows. A student admitted through reservation may be persistently identified by that route of entry, while the social circumstances of an unreserved-category student remain unexamined. One person becomes a representative of a category; another is treated as an individual.

Where this distinction becomes a judgement about intellectual worth, reservation can follow a student through classrooms, hostels and laboratories. A difficult semester may carry the fear that personal struggle will be interpreted as proof of a community’s supposed inadequacy. Equal admission therefore requires an accompanying institutional commitment to equal treatment.

IIT Bombay’s own survey evidence makes this concern concrete. Reporting on the SC/ST Cell’s February 2022 survey described responses from 388 students, approximately one-fifth of the institution’s SC/ST student population. Nearly 37 per cent of respondents said they had been asked their entrance-examination ranks in an attempt to identify their caste. Some 15.5 per cent reported mental-health difficulties arising from caste discrimination.

These figures describe the respondents’ reported experiences. They should not be presented as a statistically established prevalence rate for the entire campus. Their significance nevertheless remains substantial: students were describing forms of social identification and distress that the institution needed to understand and address.

A question about rank can be an ordinary conversation. Used to infer caste and establish a hierarchy of entitlement, it has a different meaning. Institutional sensitivity requires attention to that context.

IIT Bombay subsequently described the surveys as informal and stated that their specific results had not previously been shared with senior administrators, although the SC/ST Cell had taken steps in response. That explanation identifies a further concern: whether information about vulnerability travels effectively from students and support bodies to those who hold administrative authority.

Darshan Solanki’s death in February 2023 intensified this debate. The institute’s interim inquiry said it had found no specific evidence of direct caste discrimination beyond his sister’s statement and pointed to academic difficulties. Student collectives challenged the account and raised concerns about discrimination and shortcomings in support. These positions must be accurately attributed rather than converted into settled judicial conclusions.

The institutional lesson extends beyond any one disputed case. A complaint may remain unproved while a support system still requires improvement. Conversely, the existence of support services does not establish that a particular student could access them safely or trusted them sufficiently to seek help.

Faculty representation is part of this discussion because authority on a campus is exercised through teachers, supervisors, selection committees and administrators. Who occupies those positions influences which experiences are familiar within decision-making and which concerns require repeated explanation.

The government’s intervention in IIT faculty reservation predates the 2019 legislation and recent recruitment campaigns. Contemporary reporting from December 2009 recorded that former Human Resource Development Minister Arjun Singh had pressed IITs to introduce faculty quotas and that his successor, Kapil Sibal, had subsequently directed implementation. The report described resistance within the institutions, followed by recruitment preparations at IIT Kharagpur, IIT Bombay and IIT Roorkee. [Business Standard, reproduced by Rediff, December 14, 2009](https://www.rediff.com/money/report/tech-iits-advertise-to-fill-faculty-quota-seats/20091214.htm).

The framework described in that report prescribed 15 per cent reservation for SC candidates, 7.5 per cent for ST candidates and 27 per cent for OBC candidates. Its application distinguished between entry-level Assistant Professor positions in science and technology and recruitment in other subjects, where reservation also extended to Associate Professor and Professor posts. An IIT Bombay official explained that the institution’s advertisements now expressly mentioned reservation to attract applications.

This history should not be compressed into a claim that every faculty rank became uniformly covered and fully compliant in a single year. Government instructions, recruitment advertisements, selection decisions, appointment offers and actual joining dates represent different stages. Their separation is essential to assessing implementation.

The Central Educational Institutions (Reservation in Teachers’ Cadre) Act, 2019 subsequently provided a statutory framework. In its February 2025 parliamentary reply, the Ministry of Education stated that IIT and IIM recruitment operated under institutional rules and the Act. It also referred to special recruitment instructions issued in August 2021 and mission-mode recruitment undertaken from September 2022.

Repeated policy interventions make it reasonable to ask what changed in practice. How many appointments followed? Which backlog vacancies remained? How many candidates received offers but did not join? What explains differences between institutions and disciplines?

IIT Bombay’s own parliamentary correspondence provides a useful starting point. In a November 21, 2024 communication, its Registrar reported 1,225 sanctioned faculty positions, 742 filled positions and 483 vacancies as of October 31. The document acknowledged shortfalls in SC/ST/OBC representation and attributed unfilled positions to an insufficient availability of suitable candidates with the required qualifications and experience. It also recorded 32 offers under the 2021–22 special drive and seven under the 2023–24 drive up to the reporting date.

Those figures require careful interpretation. The 483 vacancies cannot all be described as reserved-category backlog posts. Offers cannot automatically be counted as completed appointments. But the institute’s explanation concerning suitability invites legitimate scrutiny of how suitability is assessed.

Who identifies the research specialisations for which a department recruits? Are those choices supported by a documented academic plan? How are applications shortlisted? Are evaluation criteria established in advance and applied consistently? Are conflicts of interest declared? Does the record explain why candidates meeting advertised eligibility requirements were rejected?

These questions are compatible with demanding academic standards. Indeed, standards become more credible when the procedures through which they are applied can be examined.

The national figures also warrant attention. The Ministry’s February 2025 reply reported that IITs and IIMs together had filled 3,027 faculty positions under mission-mode recruitment up to December 23, 2024, including 276 SC and 52 ST appointments. These correspond to approximately 9.1 per cent and 1.7 per cent of the reported appointments. The same reply restated reservation shares of 15 per cent for SCs and 7.5 per cent for STs.

These are combined recruitment figures, not IIT Bombay’s faculty composition. Without the relevant rosters and vacancy categories, they do not independently establish the legal position of every recruitment exercise. They nevertheless demonstrate why counting recruitment drives is insufficient. Public accountability requires disclosure of outcomes and remaining obligations.

This is where the work of the *Ambedkar Periyar Phule Study Circle, or APPSC, at IIT Bombay* becomes significant. Its use of the Right to Information Act has helped bring recruitment and admissions records into public discussion. The collective has sought to test institutional assurances against information supplied by the institutions themselves.

In April 2024, The Quint reported APPSC’s RTI-based finding that IIT Bombay had recruited 21 faculty members during 2023: 17 from the General category and four from the SC category, with no ST or OBC appointments in that dataset. It also reported the collective’s concerns about the absence of ST admissions in several departments during the 2023–24 PhD admission cycle. These findings were attributed to APPSC’s information requests; they were not judicial determinations of unlawful conduct.

IIT Bombay disputed the presentation of the recruitment figures. Its public response stated that, since 2021, offers had been extended to 27 SC, six ST, 29 OBC non-creamy-layer and one EWS candidate. Some candidates had joined, others were expected to join, and interviews remained incomplete in certain departments. APPSC replied that its figures originated in the institute’s own RTI responses.

The disagreement illustrates the need for comparable information. Appointments in one calendar year cannot be directly compared with offers accumulated across several years. A public explanation should identify the period, recruitment route and appointment status underlying each total.

APPSC’s intervention has thus served a wider democratic function. It has made the administrative details of representation visible and contestable. Its claims should be checked, and any errors corrected. Institutional rebuttals should meet the same evidentiary standard. Transparency becomes meaningful when both sides can refer to a reconciled public record.

The collective also challenged the 2020 recommendation of a government-appointed committee chaired by the then IIT Delhi director, V. Ramgopal Rao, that IITs be exempted from faculty reservation. The committee had been asked to examine effective implementation. Reporting recorded APPSC’s objection to an exercise intended to improve compliance producing a recommendation for exemption. [The report is also reproduced on IIT Madras’s website](https://acr.iitm.ac.in/iitm_news_repository/exempt-iit-recruitments-from-reservation-suggests-panel/).

The recommendation did not itself create an exemption. Its importance lies in the underlying policy choice. Should national importance reduce an institution’s obligations towards representation, or increase its responsibility to demonstrate that inclusion and advanced scholarship can flourish together?

The latter approach would treat public investment as carrying a duty to widen participation in intellectual authority. Recruitment would be followed by fair access to laboratories, research opportunities, mentorship, promotion and effective remedies against discrimination.

The historical record shows that faculty inclusion cannot be reduced to appointment alone. At IIT Kanpur, Dalit academic Subrahmanyam Saderla’s allegations led to intervention by the National Commission for Scheduled Castes and institutional inquiries reported in 2018. The Allahabad High Court subsequently quashed the November 2018 FIR and related proceedings in March 2020. A responsible account must include that outcome and distinguish institutional findings from criminal liability.

Such disputes underline the need for credible procedures that protect complainants, respondents and witnesses. They also show why institutional histories must be documented with care. Accuracy is indispensable to a persuasive argument for reform.

Student deaths make questions of institutional care especially urgent. In July 2023, the Education Ministry reported 98 student suicides since 2018 across the specified centrally funded higher-education institutions, including 39 at IITs. These figures were not confined to SC/ST students and did not establish a common cause. They indicated a serious problem requiring sustained attention across the system.

The Supreme Court addressed institutional responsibility in Amit Kumar and Others v. Union of India and Others, decided on March 24, 2025. The case arose from the deaths of two Scheduled Caste students at IIT Delhi and their families’ efforts to secure registration of FIRs. The Court examined the wider environment of student distress and discrimination.

It criticised a “severe lack of institutional empathy and accountability” and emphasised universities’ responsibilities for students’ well-being. It established a National Task Force chaired by former Supreme Court judge S. Ravindra Bhat. Its remit expressly included caste discrimination, academic pressure, financial burdens, harassment and other sources of distress. These observations required institutional action without determining the cause of every individual death.

The implication for campus policy is substantial. Counselling must be available, accessible and trusted. Where a student reports discrimination, support must also include a credible response to the complaint. Where distress arises from academic difficulty, assistance should be timely enough to prevent avoidable isolation.

Disciplinary procedures require comparable care. Allegations of examination misconduct should be addressed through documented evidence, an opportunity to respond, proportionate decisions and an accessible review process. Student welfare remains relevant throughout. A young person’s alleged misconduct should not become an official judgement on their entire character.

IIT Bombay’s reform agenda should therefore connect matters often treated separately: student welfare, anti-discrimination safeguards, academic discipline, faculty recruitment and institutional communication.

An annual public reservation-compliance statement would be a practical beginning. It should distinguish sanctioned posts, applicable rosters, backlog vacancies, applications, shortlisting, offers, actual appointments and departures. Differences between RTI replies, parliamentary submissions and public statements should be explained.

Grievance systems should publish aggregate information about complaints, disposal times and action taken while protecting privacy. Reviews should examine whether complainants fear retaliation and whether the composition of inquiry bodies inspires confidence. Students and faculty from marginalised communities should participate meaningfully in evaluating these mechanisms.

The Ministry of Education and Boards of Governors also have responsibilities. Institutional autonomy requires space for academic judgement, accompanied by oversight of whether recruitment and grievance procedures meet public obligations. Persistent unexplained disparities warrant examination rather than repetitive assurances.

The central question is whether elite institutions are willing to apply to their own governance the habits of scrutiny they demand in scholarship. Evidence must be disclosed, inconsistencies explained and conclusions revised when the record requires it.

IIT Bombay’s reputation can become stronger through that process. Its scientific accomplishments are substantial. Its public standing will be more secure when students and faculty can also trust that dignity is protected, complaints receive a fair hearing and opportunities are administered transparently.

The government’s earlier reservation initiative, APPSC’s RTI work and the Supreme Court’s intervention belong to a continuing effort to make public education answerable to those it serves. IIT Bombay now has an opportunity to demonstrate that excellence includes the courage to examine itself.

Reporting cut-off: September 21, 2026. Allegations concerning Sahil Wakode’s death remain under investigation. Historical figures refer to their stated reporting periods.

- Dr. Pankaj Tambe is an Ambedkarite thinker, writer, and researcher based in Nagpur, Maharashtra. His work focuses on the thought of Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, social justice, equality, democracy, constitutional values, and the struggle against caste discrimination. Through his writings, he promotes Ambedkarite philosophy and encourages critical thinking, education, and social transformation.