At Independence, the Indian higher education system was small, elitist, and socially exclusive, concentrated in a few institutions and dominated by the privileged castes, with limited access for Dalits, Adivasis, and women. By 2021–22, it had expanded to cover 1,168 universities, 45,473 colleges, and over 12,000 stand-alone institutions, enrolling 4.33 crore students. Yet, it still remains chronically underfunded, with public expenditure around 4 per cent of the GDP against the long-standing 6 per cent policy target.
India, instead of strengthening the base of the school system, created islands of excellence in the form of elite institutions such as the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs), which catered mainly to privileged castes and classes and to the corporate sector. The educational space has since expanded manifold, but the historical dominance of the privileged castes and classes has persisted unabated. Caste inequality persists in higher education not merely through entry barriers but also through the definition of merit, the exercise of institutional authority, and the unequal conditions of belonging.
There is reservation in higher education for oppressed groups: Scheduled Castes (SCs), Scheduled Tribes (STs), and the Other Backward Classes (OBCs). B.R. Ambedkar, credited with this policy, saw education primarily as a means for Dalits to enter government service and professional fields, gain administrative influence, and build a protective presence in an otherwise hostile state. His principal struggle was to establish Dalits as a distinct political community, like the religious minorities who were given separate electorates and reservation of seats in legislative bodies. He achieved this aim through Ramsay MacDonald’s Communal Award in 1932. Mahatma Gandhi, however, opposed the move and undertook a fast, leading to the Poona Pact, which was committed to the educational advancement of “untouchables” and their fair representation in public services. It laid the foundation for reservation, which was subsequently incorporated into the Constitution.
Reservation matters most where educational opportunity is scarce and competition intense. For example, in JEE Advanced 2024, about 1,80,000 candidates competed for roughly 17,000 IIT seats, making access to a reserved seat potentially life-changing. Its significance is therefore greatest at the apex of a highly unequal educational system, where a small pool of elite institutions confers disproportionate social and economic status.
There is no doubt that reservation has benefited Dalits immensely; without it, their position would have most certainly been worse. But it placed a protected cohort within existing institutions rather than transforming the caste structure that surrounds them. The persistence of caste discrimination within institutions that have admitted growing numbers of Dalit, Adivasi, and OBC students, therefore, points not so much to a failure of reservation as to the limits of what it was designed to achieve.
Two theoretical lenses
Two conceptual tools help explain how caste persists within institutions formally designated as caste blind. The first is Ambedkar’s notion of graded inequality, which, in its modern operation, is more uneven than the term suggests. The ritual gradation of caste remains visible in matters such as marriage and commensality, but in most other spheres, caste operates more as a broad divide between Dalits and non-Dalits. Higher education produces another configuration: here, the institutional distinction is increasingly between “general” and “reserved” categories, with the latter associated particularly with Dalits and, to a lesser extent, with Adivasis. OBC students, despite benefiting from the largest share of reservation, generally attract less resentment and may themselves identify more readily with general-category students than with SC and ST students. Thus, caste continues to structure institutional relations but not always as a continuous hierarchy; it can instead produce shifting solidarities and antagonisms, depending on the context.
Faculty vacancies among reserved categories in Central universities.
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By special arrangement
The second lens is cultural and social capital, developed by Pierre Bourdieu and adapted for India by scholars such as Satish Deshpande and Ajantha Subramanian. Caste shapes access to education, occupations, social networks, and cultural resources, while class determines the material means through which these advantages or disadvantages are reproduced. What entrance examinations certify as “merit” often reflects accumulated advantages: English-medium schooling, coaching, educated lineage, urban exposure, familiarity with examination culture, and networks that make professional careers imaginable. Because these resources are unequally distributed along caste and class lines, inherited advantage is converted into individual achievement as “merit” while an examination score is mistaken for a caste-neutral measure of ability.
The same logic continues inside institutions. Open-category entrants are presumed to be talented while reserved-category entrants are often treated as exceptions whose competence requires explanation. The resulting “quota student” stigma turns a constitutionally legitimate mechanism into an informal blot of lesser ability. Meritocratic ideology can thus acknowledge that caste shapes outcomes even as it locates its effects entirely before admission. It renders inherited privilege invisible and recasts structural disadvantage as individual deficiency—even to those who experience it.
The neoliberal rupture
In the early post-Independence decades, reservation in education was largely confined to state-run and state-aided institutions, leaving private, unaided institutions, including those run by minority communities, mostly outside its direct reach. Economic liberalisation in 1991 accelerated the expansion of private higher education, much of it commercially driven. By 2020–21, private institutions accounted for about 80 per cent of the seats in engineering and technical institutions approved by the All India Council for Technical Education, enrolling 12.74 lakh students against 3.88 lakh in government institutions. Across professional courses, they accounted for 71 per cent of undergraduate and 59 per cent of postgraduate enrolment. Although some are covered by state reservation policies, no uniform nationwide mandate applies to the private sector. A substantial share of professional education thus remains beyond affirmative action. Private professional education is financially and culturally accessible mainly to those who already possess substantial means.
Top-tier public institutions such as the IITs and the IIMs, despite the proliferation of private institutions, remain highly coveted. The intense competition for admission has made expensive coaching classes a crucial determinant, thus effectively excluding poor students—Dalit and non-Dalit alike—before they even encounter the formal reservation system. Only a minuscule segment of second- or third-generation beneficiaries of reservation can afford coaching. Even where quotas exist, high fees and coaching costs exclude most Dalits as well as a large section of the wider population. The neoliberal expansion of professional education has thus deepened the intersection of caste and class, making access to elite educational opportunities increasingly dependent on the ability to pay.
Faculty reservation
While student admissions have widened partially through reservation, faculty representation for marginalised castes remains severely limited. A 2023 Parliamentary Standing Committee review found that 28.56 per cent of about 18,940 sanctioned teaching posts across IITs, IIMs, National Institutes of Technology, Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research, and Central universities were vacant. Vacancies were particularly high among reserved categories in Central universities: 41.6 per cent for OBCs, 40.9 per cent for STs, and 34 per cent for SCs. Earlier Lok Sabha data (2018–19) showed that 16 of 18 IIMs had no ST faculty and 12 had no SC faculty; 15 of 23 IITs had no ST faculty. STs occupied just 21 of 8,856 sanctioned posts nationally.
Findings of a survey conducted among 388 students by IIT Bombay’s SC/ST Students’ Cell in 2022.
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By special arrangement
Rather than address this deficit, institutional responses have often sought to dilute reservation. A 2017 Allahabad High Court judgment, upheld by the Supreme Court in 2019, shifted faculty reservation from institution-wide to department-wise recruitment, sharply reducing reserved posts. A government analysis of 21 Central universities estimated that SC, ST, and OBC reserved posts would fall from 2,663 to 1,241. Following opposition, a March 2019 ordinance, later replaced by legislation, restored the institution as the unit for calculating reservation in covered Central institutions. Earlier, official IIT committees had also proposed exempting these institutions from faculty reservation.
The faculty ceiling is more than a question of numbers. Students admitted through quotas encounter a largely privileged-caste professoriate whose members serve as mentors, supervisors, referees, and holders of everyday institutional authority. Thus, the gate opened through reservation can narrow again at every subsequent stage, where judgment, patronage, and discretion shape the prospects of an academic career.
The architecture of everyday caste
Within institutions, caste rarely operates through explicit exclusion. It is reproduced through everyday practices: probing surnames to establish caste, asking entrance ranks, informal segregation in peer groups, and assumptions of lesser competence. An IIT Bombay SC/ST Students’ Cell survey in 2022, covering nearly 400 respondents, found that about a quarter had been asked their surname to identify their caste and over a third had been asked their entrance score after their category became known. A minority also reported mental health effects linked to caste discrimination, even as most reported no personal experience of caste slurs.
Students protest against the death of IIT student Darshan Solanki outside IIT Bombay, Powai, in 2023.
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EMMANUAL YOGINI
Administrative discretion offers another channel. In 2025, right-wing students’ groups at IIT Bombay objected when the Humanities and Social Sciences Department made arrangements for students observing Ramzan to avail of Sehri meals. Two students affiliated to the Ambedkar Phule Periyar Study Circle, who defended the observance by citing the open celebration of Hindu festivals on campus, were penalised for speaking to the media. One received an 8-month suspension; the other, a Dalit student, received a 13-month suspension and permanent hostel ban. The disparity is especially striking given their circumstances: the non-Dalit student was nearing the completion of his PhD while the Dalit student was only in his second year. The latter has since challenged the punishment in the Bombay High Court. Beyond the proportionality of the penalties, the episode raises questions about institutional authority over students’ freedom of expression, a constitutional right.
A deeper problem arises when institutions investigate allegations of caste discrimination against themselves. Such self-investigation creates an inherent conflict of interest since findings of discrimination challenge their claim to meritocratic neutrality. In 2023, a first-year BTech student, Darshan Solanki, died by suicide at IIT Bombay. An internal committee found no specific evidence of caste discrimination, a conclusion disputed by his family and student groups. A police investigation not only produced a different evidentiary picture but also denied the caste angle.
The upstream collapse
Inequalities in higher education originate much earlier, in a school system marked by worse inequalities. The public school system, particularly in rural areas, is suffering from declining public provision and literal closures. Between 2014–15 and 2024–25, the number of government schools fell from 11.07 lakh to 10.13 lakh, while private unaided schools’ share of enrolment rose from 31.7 per cent to 38.8 per cent. For Dalit and Adivasi children, who are disproportionately dependent on public education, this shift compounds disadvantages in access, affordability, and quality.
The disparity is reflected in dropout rates. The data from the Unified District Information System for Education Plus (UDISE+) for 2024–25 shows the secondary-level dropout rate at 13.7 per cent among SC students and 18.4 per cent among ST students, compared with 11.5 per cent for all students. The gap is particularly stark for ST students, whose dropout rate is nearly 7 percentage points above the national average.
While the data does not provide a comparable national rate for non-SC/ST students, it clearly indicates that disadvantaged communities do not experience the educational trajectory of the population as a whole.Beyond this, the declining quality of education in public schools further handicaps SC/ST students. Many enter higher education with weaker foundational skills, which put them at a disadvantage before the competition for elite institutions even begins.
Admission-seekers look for their names in the counselling list for SC/ST students at Delhi University’s Faculty of Arts.
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SHIV KUMAR PUSHPAKAR
By the time Dalit and Adivasi students compete for professional courses and elite institutions, years of disadvantage—compounded by class, geography, and unequal access to quality schooling and coaching—have already narrowed their opportunities. The representation gap in the IITs and the IIMs thus begins upstream, in a school system that distributes educational opportunity unequally. University-level reservation can widen the doors but cannot undo the inequalities that already determine who reaches them.
Redefining equality
Formal equality in higher education does not automatically ensure equality within institutions. Admission through reservation or appointment to a reserved faculty post does not dismantle caste hierarchies, which continue to play out in everyday humiliations, absence of mentorship, discriminatory disciplinary actions, and reinforced alienation.
Reservation has been indispensable in opening historically exclusionary institutions to Dalits and other marginalised groups. But it cannot, by itself, transform institutional culture or overcome the unequal schooling and material resources that precede entry. With the contraction of public education and employment, poorer Dalit families are losing the incentive and ability to pursue education, making reservation increasingly the preserve of better-off Dalits and OBCs.
Caste in higher education cannot be addressed through patchwork solutions. It requires radical restructuring, beginning with universal, compulsory, and free education of equal quality dispensed through neighbourhood government schools. Without tackling inequality at this foundational level, higher education will continue to reproduce—and aggravate—caste and class inequalities.
Anand Teltumbde is a civil rights activist and the author of over 30 books. He is the former CEO of Petronet India Ltd and a professor at IIT Kharagpur and the Goa Institute of Management.
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