Despite a special recruitment drive for Scheduled Caste (SC) and Scheduled Tribe (ST) faculty members, the representation of the SC, ST and OBCs (Other Backward Communities) remains low at IIT Bombay. According to RTI data accessed by HT, as of September this year, the institute had only five SCs and six OBCs among its 412 professors. There is no professor from the ST community.

The death of a student at IIT-Bombay has sparked a row. (Praful Gangurde/HT)

At the associate and assistant professor levels, the institute has 363 faculty members. Of these, 29 are from the SC community, eight are STs while 35 are OBCs. The RTI also shows that IIT Bombay has 1,225 approved teaching positions, of which 450 are vacant.

The RTI was filed by Gowd Kiran Kumar, chairperson of the All India OBC Students Association. In an earlier RTI filed by him, the reply he received from IIT Bombay in February said that it had 33 faculty members from the SC community across the professor, associate professor and assistant professor levels. There was one associate professor and seven assistant professors from the ST community, while 41 OBC faculty members were working at the institute at that time.

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“The September data shows that the number of SC faculty members has increased by only one since the February RTI response,” said Kumar, claiming that the data exposed the “deep-rooted caste discrimination in faculty recruitment and representation at India’s so-called elite institutions”. “When SC, ST and OBC faculty representation remains negligible or absent, how can these institutions effectively understand and address caste discrimination faced by students and scholars from these communities?” he said.

Kumar added that empathy, representation and institutional accountability could not exist without diversity. “Foreign universities increasingly recognise the importance of diverse faculty and inclusive academic environments, while many of our premier institutions continue to fail in providing adequate opportunities to qualified SC, ST and OBC PhD holders—including scholars who have earned their doctorates from these very institutions and from universities abroad,” he said.

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Dheeraj Singh, an IIT Kanpur alumnus and member of the Global IIT Alumni Support Group, said the RTI response showed that about 90% of IIT Bombay faculty members belonged to the general category, around 5% to the OBC category and around 5% to the SC and ST categories combined. “The figures alone do not show that any particular faculty member has acted with caste bias,” he said. “However, the data provides important institutional context while examining questions related to representation, fairness and the treatment of students from historically marginalised communities.”

The issue of representation of SC, ST and OBC faculty members at IITs was discussed in detail in the education community after the suicide of first-year IIT Bombay student Darshan Solanki in 2023. Following his death, the union government had asked all IITs to conduct special recruitment drives to increase the representation of SC and ST faculty members. However, Kumar’s opinion on this was that it was like “handing over an inquiry into discrimination to the very system accused of perpetuating it”.

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Another RTI filed by the Ambedkar Periyar Phule Study Circle (APPSC) in September 2024 showed that the number of candidates selected from these communities remained low. According to the RTI, in 2023 around 523 SC candidates applied for faculty recruitment at IIT Bombay but only four were selected. No candidate from the ST or OBC categories was selected that year.

In 2024, two candidates were selected from the SC category out of 44 applicants. One candidate was selected from the ST category out of 22 applicants, while three OBC candidates were selected from 106 applicants.