DALITS

Prejudice in Institutions
R eservations may give students from a Scheduled Caste
and Scheduled Tribe background access to higher
education, but it is not uncommon for these students to be
discriminated against after they enter these schools of learning.
Recently, the spotlight was turned by the media on the plight of
these students in some of the institutions of higher education.
A report in the Indian Express last month said that a majority of
the SC/ST students at the All India Institute of Medical Sci-

4392 Economic and Political Weekly October 21, 2006

ences (AIIMS) in New Delhi live in clusters in the college hostel
as that is the only way in which they feel safe and comfortable.
The students who had been allotted rooms randomly at the time
of admission sought a reallocation after the other student
groups began harassing them. AIIMS is the country’s pre-
mier medical college, which was also the centre of the most
vociferous anti-reservation agitations earlier this year. The
Indian Express obtained hostel records under the Right to
Information Act and these reveal that of the 45 male SC/ST
students who have been there for a year, 34 are living in
clusters, 23 having sought reallocation from their original
rooms. Of the 306 students at the AIIMS, 65 belong to the
SC/ST category. The authorities have given two different
versions for this state of affairs: that the students change
their rooms because of seepage and other maintenance
problems and that dalit students prefer to live alongside
their friends. Some of the students did say they moved
voluntarily because they felt comfortable in groups, while
others specifically alleged harassment. The government has
appointed a committee headed by University Grants Commis-
sion chairman Sukhdeo Thorat to investigate these com-
plaints.
Dalit students feel that they are on probation of sorts
when they are in institutions of higher learning. They are seen
as representatives of their castes/tribes, which becomes a heavy
burden to carry. The fact that the most aggressive anti-quota
protests emanated from the AIIMS must have surely made the
dalit students even more aware of their separate identity.
It would be presumptuous to tar all institutions of higher
learning as being inherently elitist and intolerant of socio-
economic diversity or to imply that the faculty and authorities
there are uniformly anti-dalit. However, dalits who have passed
through the country’s premier educational institutions have
a number of valid complaints. In almost all these institutions
there are hardly any faculty members who also belong to the
scheduled castes/tribes, thus robbing these students
Economic and Political Weekly October 21, 2006
of role models and sympathetic shoulders. The harrowing process
of adjusting to a new milieu is compounded by the label
of “reserved category student” and the open hostility of their
peers.
Courses in such institutions are a challenge to even students
who come from more privileged backgrounds. Dalit students end
up being forced, on top of coping with the academic challenges,
to carry the weight of social and peer disapproval in their living
environments. It is the dalits from a rural background, often
the first among their families to reach this level of academic
qualification, who suffer the most. Obviously, those who
belong to the creamy layer would be better equipped to deal
with a hostile environment though they too would be caught
in a double bind – that of acknowledging their caste identity
while belonging to a relatively economically privileged class.
A New Delhi-based research organisation, the Centre for
Forecasting and Research, using the Right to Information Act
found that SC/ST graduates of management institutes are paid
lower than the others during placements and that the recipient
of the lowest salary offered is usually a dalit. The survey also
found that SC/ST students were mostly recruited by the public
sector enterprises rather than by multinationals.
It is not easy to successfully tackle such strong hostility
to the SC/ST reserved category students in institutes of higher
education. But deal with it, we must. One way would be to
follow affirmative action in the recruitment to faculty. Dalit
students too could organise themselves across regions and
universities, not only to form a pressure lobby but also to help
their own deal with unfamiliar situations. A recent national
convention of dalit students at the Jawaharlal Nehru Univer-
sity found that those from rural areas need to be encouraged
to find their voice even within the SC student community.
The long-term solution is obviously to address this issue
in schools, to ensure that textbook syllabus does not make
whole communities and castes invisible and that all children
regardless of caste access the same educational facilities. EPW
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