After the Indian Institute of Management Tiruchirapally (IIM Trichy), a new Right to Information (RTI) response revealed that IIM Indore also has negligible-to-nil faculty from the Scheduled Caste, Scheduled Tribe and Other Backward Classes categories.
In reply to the RTI, which Kiran Kumar Gowd, President of the All India OBC Students Association (AIOBCSA) filed, dated today, September 20, IIM Indore disclosed that all of its faculty positions reserved in the SC/ST categories remain vacant.
In addition, only two positions in the OBC category and one in the Economically Weaker Section category were filled.
Thus, out of 150 faculty posts in total, only three Reserved category faculty posts were filled – leaving 41 posts vacant.
Sharing this development on its X account, the association calls these numbers “not acceptable” and “alarming”.
This comes just two days after IIT Trichy replied to AIOBCSA’s RTI on September 18, revealing that 100 per cent of its ST, 86.66 per cent of the SC, and 83.33 per cent of the OBC posts remained vacant.
Speaking to EdexLive about these vacancies, Gowd said that he initially filed the RTI query to the Ministry of Education, but it got redirected to the higher educational institutions in the country.
“The ministry claimed that it had no data or knowledge about how many Reserved posts were occupied and how many are vacant,” he said and calls it a sorry state of affairs.
“Despite producing so many graduates and doctorates from SC/ST/OBC categories, faculty positions are not being filled. Why are SC/ST/OBC scholars not being employed by academic institutions?”, he questions.
Gowd further says that it is shocking that the Ministry of Education has not been keeping a tab on faculty recruitment in Reserved categories.
“We are looking for ways to challenge these vacancies, and hold the IIMs accountable,” he told EdexLive.
A pattern among HEIs?
However, these revelations are a part of a broader, more systemic issue, as pointed out by anticaste and social justice student groups, who have been alleging serious lapses in the recruitment of SC/ST and OBC faculty in India’s premier educational institutions.
The Ambedkar Periyar Phule Study Circle (APPSC) in the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, an Ambedkarite student collective, for instance, published a series of reports based on RTI data collected by it titled “Indian Institutes of Upper CasTes”, which showed alarmingly low numbers of SC, ST, and OBC faculty members in various IITs.
For instance, in IIT Bombay, SC, ST, and OBC faculty formed a combined strength of 6 per cent of the total faculty as of 2024, and entire departments at various IITs, including IIT Kanpur, IIT Delhi, and IIT Kharagpur had zero SC, ST, or OBC faculty members.
In 2020, the Ministry of Education formed a committee to ensure that vacant posts are in the reserved category across educational institutions. However, there has been no update from the committee since its formation, informs a member of APPSC.
He adds that the committee instead recommended ways for IITs to be exempt from reservation policies by getting recognised as “Institutes of Eminence”.
The committee also “blatantly lied” about IITs following reservation policies, APPSC wrote in its blog, “Caste on Campus” in 2020.
“Instead of highlighting wrongs in the existing selection process and recommending ways to correct those, the committee carries their casteist ignorance and leaves the blame on the candidates from reserved categories for not being ‘qualified enough’,” the collective said in its blog post.
The member also adds that this has been a recurring pattern in higher education institutions, especially IITs and IIMs.
“Despite pointing it out several times, reserved posts still remain vacant. It is almost as if the institutes’ boards do not care,” he says.
According to him, the management councils of these institutions are comprised primarily of Upper Caste members, who are shut off by ideological and parochial blinders which prevent them from filling reserved posts.
