Dalit student death | IIT-Bombay admits to conducting surveys to end ‘culture of exclusion’
The Hindu
Institute says surveys conducted to ‘prioritise’ tasks; results not made public as consent of participants not taken
Two days after it said “discrimination by students, if at all it occurs, is an exception”, the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay on Thursday admitted that it had conducted two campus-wide surveys that documented different kinds of caste discrimination faced by Scheduled Caste/Scheduled Tribe students and the consequent mental health issues they were facing, as reported by The Hindu on Wednesday.
This comes amid charges from the Ambedkar Periyar Phule Study Circle (APPSC), a student body of the campus that the institute was responsible for the death of 18-year-old Dalit student, Darshan Solanki, who allegedly killed himself inside the institute on Sunday afternoon. The student body alleged that the institute was aware of the scale of the problems faced by SC/ST students and still did not take steps to address them in time.
Also read: Jignesh Mevani demands SIT probe into IITB student's death
On Thursday, IIT-Bombay officials confirmed that two surveys were conducted by the SC/ST Cell, one of which was conducted in collaboration with the Student Wellness Centre (first in February 2022 and second in June 2022) to address issues of discrimination and “culture of exclusion”. The institute said, “The purpose of the surveys was to gauge the priorities of the tasks ahead and get suggestions on new tasks for the SC/ST students’ cell.”
Because of this, the institute had not taken explicit consent of the participants to publish the results of the surveys, the administration explained, justifying the move to keep the results confidential in the face of demands from the APPSC that these results be made public.
“The surveys indeed helped to prioritise the tasks; various SC/ST cell initiatives were started,” the institute added, saying among these measures were the SC/ST Cell mentorship programme, the caste-sensitisation course (mandatory for all), and. scholarship-related hand-holding workshops.
While the institute said it had the sensitisation course in the works ever since the two surveys were completed last year, officials added that the content for this course “is under preparation”.
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