Charges of caste-profiling during placements ‘misleading’, IIT-Delhi tells NCSC 

IIT Delhi denies caste profiling allegations during placements, stating category data is not shared with recruiters without consent.

The Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, has denied allegations of caste profiling of students during campus placements saying that the information on the socio-economic category and JEE-Advanced rank appeared only on the students’ interface of the recruitment portal, and that no recruiter could view these without the consent of students concerned.

In its response filed before the National Commission for Scheduled Castes (NCSC), which in January initiated an inquiry into a complaint of discriminatory placement practices at IIT-Bombay and IIT-Delhi, IIT-Delhi also said that it is unable to share data on category-wise placements as this has to be separately compiled.

The NCSC had on January 15 issued notices to both the institutes and the Union Ministry of Education for a detailed action-taken report.

In response to the notice, IIT-Delhi’s Assistant Registrar (Legal), Deepak Raja, told the Commission, in a letter dated January 29, that the complaint should be closed as the allegations are “completely baseless and incorrect”. IIT-Bombay and the Ministry are yet to submit their responses. 

IIT-Delhi insisted that the complaint’s contention of caste-profiling by the placements office is “completely misleading”, adding that “category data is not shared by the institute under ordinary circumstances with any recruiter”. 

However, the institute added, “Currently, these fields have been removed from the login page of the student as well”, without elaborating why or when the decision to remove these details was taken. It did, however, add that category data may be shared only if the student “requires” it to be shared with recruiters such as government organisations or Public Sector Undertakings.

In the complaint, filed in November 2023, IIT alumnus Dheeraj Singh had noted that Scheduled Caste students at these institutes had been subjected to discriminatory practices as the institute required them to mandatorily fill in information about their socio-economic categories and their JEE-Advanced ranks – both markers of their caste.