Months before Dalit student’s death, IIT-Bombay surveyed caste-discrimination on campus
The Hindu
Surveys documented caste discrimination faced by students and mental health issues related to it
Months before the 18-year-old Dalit student, Darshan Solanki, killed himself inside the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay barely three months into his Chemical Engineering course, the institute’s Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe Cell (SC/ST Cell) had conducted two campus-wide surveys about caste discrimination and mental health issues faced by SC/ST students, The Hindu has learnt.
Sources who have seen the survey results have said that the two surveys collected information about the caste discrimination experiences of Dalit and Adivasi students on campus and the consequences of these experiences in the forms of mental health issues that they faced.
According to internal documents seen by The Hindu and the sources aware of the survey, the institute knew of issues faced by SC/ST students and the need for “affirmative counselling for marginalized communities”. The institute was working to introduce certain measures to address them based on the results of the surveys, among other things. However, as of February 1, 2023, these measures were still a work in progress, the documents showed.
The institute, in an official statement issued on Tuesday, said, “While no steps can be 100% effective, discrimination by students, if at all it occurs, is an exception.”
The first of these surveys was conducted in February 2022, which collected information about experiences of caste discrimination faced by SC/ST students inside IIT-Bombay and from whom they faced these issues. The survey was circulated amongst all SC/ST students in the institute - numbering around 2,000. Around 20% of the SC/ST students had responded to this survey, sources said.
According to the personal experiences of SC/ST students that the Ambedkar Periyar Phule Study Circle has collected, the most common way of caste discrimination within the institute manifested in the form of anti-reservation sentiment. This came in the form of SC/ST students being made fun of and being looked down upon for their reserved category status, faculty “blaming” them for lowering the quality of IITs, and not many mechanisms to address these issues.
A lot of these experiences also made it to the survey conducted by the institute’s SC/ST Cell in February 2022, the sources confirmed.
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