Students' groups and activists have been demanding better representation of the marginalised section of the society in the country's eminent institutes like IITs and IIMs for quite some time now. Joining the brigade, Lok Sabha MP Thol Thirumavalavan met Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan on July 20 and submitted a letter urging him to implement reservation properly in these institutes.

The MP from Tamil Nadu's Chidambaram put up a photo of him submitting a letter to Pradhan and tweeted, "I met the Union Minister of Education Dharmendra Pradhan in New Delhi today and demanded implementation of proper reservation in educational institutions like IIT and IIM for SC, ST and OBC students."

In an open letter to the MPs of both the houses, Egalitarians, a group of students and activists, urged them to discuss discrimination at IITs and the IIMs during faculty recruitment and  PhD admissions. "Data collected through the RTI act reveals that of the total (excluding IIT Mandi) 5945 teaching faculties in the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), only 0.6 per cent belong to the  Scheduled Tribes (STs), 3.1 per cent belong to the Scheduled Castes (SCs), and 8.1 per cent belong to the Other Backward Castes (OBCs) (the caste category wise number of teaching faculties for each IITs are listed in the Annexure I)," they wrote. "Similarly, in the Indian Institutes of Management  (IIMs), of the total 667 teaching faculties (excluding IIM Ahmedabad, Indore, and Rohtak),  only 0.4 per cent are ST, 2.7 per cent are SC, and 6.0 per cent are OBC. The picture is exactly the same when it comes to PhD admissions," added the letter which the Egalitarians claimed was referenced in Dr Thirumavalavan's letter to Pradhan.