Nitish Kashyap (Mumbai) The suicide of darshan solanki, a first year B.Tech student at the top-ranked Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay (IIT-B, estb.1958) on February 12, has cast a spotlight on the issue of student suicides, especially students admitted under the Central government’s reservations policy. Under this affirmative action policy, 22.5 percent of seats in all 23 IITs countrywide are reserved for school-leavers from the scheduled castes (SCs) and scheduled tribes (STs) and another 27 percent for students of OBCs (other backward classes/castes). All aspirants for admission are obliged to write the IIT-JEE (joint entrance examination) and IIT-Mains — reportedly the toughest entrance exams worldwide — but affirmative action quota students have lower cut-offs. Darshan Solanki was admitted under the affirmative action policy. Following reports of on-campus discrimination, an internal IIT-B committee investigating Darshan’s death concluded that there was no specific evidence of caste-based discrimination against the deceased student. The committee’s report attributed his suicide to “poor academic performance” and “aloofness” and dismissed allegations of on-campus caste discrimination. It rejected a statement of IIT-B’s SC/ST cell to the committee that Darshan had suffered caste-based discrimination from general (merit) category students. With admission into the country’s IITs highly prized – 1.2 million school-leavers write the annual IIT-JEE, of whom 2 percent are admitted — the generous reserved quota has always been resented by general (‘merit’) quota students who argue that merit, i.e, topping the entrance exams should be the sole criterion for admission into the much prized IITs. On the other hand, liberals contend that SCs, STs and OBCs have suffered caste-based alienation and denial of education from the upper castes for several millennia. Therefore, they deserve favoured admission. This subject has often provoked nationwide agitations and numerous court-room battles until in the interests of balancing merit with social justice, in Indira Sawhney vs. Union of India & Ors (1992), the Supreme Court capped the reserved quota at 50 percent. And although IIT authorities are strictly prohibited from disclosing the caste identities and quota details of students on campus, merit students have devised ways and means to discover the caste backgrounds of quota students during the infamous ‘ragging’ of freshers (now tempered down), to label the latter and disparage them with snide hurtful remarks (see www.educationworld.in/pernicious-casteism.in-academia). In this particular case, the haste with which the IIT-B internal investigation ruled out the caste angle has aroused suspicion against the management. Last year (2022), the Ambedkar Periyar Phule Study Circle (APPSC), a student body at IIT-B, had complained to the National Commission for Scheduled Tribes (NCST) that the head counsellor of the institute’s Student Wellness Center (SWC) had signed a public petition to end caste-based reservation i.e, affirmative action, and posted it on social media. APPSC had highlighted in its complaint that this incident discouraged quota students from seeking SWC advice. It was also highlighted that none of the student counsellors were from SC or ST backgrounds and that for many backward class students, meeting them was causing more harm than good. Taking…
