NCSC notice on year-old plaint of caste discrimination at IIT campus placements
The Hindu
NCSC investigates caste discrimination complaints at IIT Delhi and IIT Bombay, urging action from Education Ministry.
The National Commission for Scheduled Castes (NCSC) has now taken up a complaint of caste discrimination at the hands of the campus placement offices in the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi and IIT-Bombay, over a year after it was filed in November 2023.
Issuing notices to the Directors of both institutions, the NCSC has also called for the Ministry of Education in New Delhi to file an action-taken report with regards to the complaint filed by Dheeraj Singh, education activist and alumnus of the institutes.
The NCSC notice, issued on January 15, comes within days of the Supreme Court taking up a case of rampant caste discrimination within higher education campuses across the country and asking for the University Grants Commission to provide details of all such complaints.
The complaint to the NCSC was filed in the background of a string of suicides of Scheduled Caste students at IIT Bombay and IIT Delhi, which had triggered a wave of complaints from students — past and present — about discriminatory practices on campus, including mandatory revelations of their caste category for campus placements, as reported by The Hindu at the time.
In the complaint, Mr. Singh said that he had evidence of discriminatory practices by the institutes that had affected at least 300 SC students for the placement year 2023-24. He also attached screenshots of the placement office forms of the instituted, which required students to disclose their socioeconomic category and JEE rank — both identifiers of caste.
Officials said that the complaint was on track to be processed as per procedure but due to technical glitches, a bunch of complaints had to be handled manually. As a result, it took time for the Commission to get to this complaint.
The IITs and the Education Ministry have been given 15 days to respond to the NCSC’s notice on the complaint.
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