IITs and Caste

It was the summer of 2016. I walked into Jwalamukhi Hostel at IIT Delhi and met my other two room mates.

“What are your JEE ranks, beta?” one of our parents casually asked.

101, 102, 103. Consecutive!

It did not take us more than a few hours talking around in the wing to realise what had happened. A genius in the administration had sorted the student list by AIR that year and assigned consecutive roll numbers. To make matters worse, hostels had also been allotted using these roll numbers.

The allotments ended up grouping students roughly according to the category through which they had been admitted. Your hostel and department together had now become a way for people to guess your caste.

Sure, it was an administrative mistake. But it took months for the administration to recognise it! They eventually offered students the option of changing hostels, but by then it was too late. Friends were made and Social circles had already formed (which are now very correlated to your caste). Barely anyone took up the offer.

Over the years, I realised that the labelling did not end with hostel allotment. Students, and professors too (rarely, but non-zero), would ask about JEE ranks and pass judgment. You had made it to IIT, but apparently there was still a question of how you had made it.

Then there were rules that were caste-agnostic on paper and seemed to forget how the institute admitted its students in the first place.

It was no secret that differences in JEE performance often carried over into college GPA. At the time, you needed a GPA of at least 7 out of 10 to hold most positions of responsibility. This disproportionately excluded students from reserved categories.

The number 7 was not arbitrary. We had relative grading, and 7 was roughly the average grade awarded in many courses. Setting the eligibility cutoff at 7 therefore excluded a large part of the class by design. And when close to half the batch had been admitted through categories with different cut-offs, it was hardly surprising that the effect was not evenly distributed.

On paper, the logic was simple. If you were struggling academically, you should focus on academics. Fair enough. But this also meant that you could not organise an event, lead a team or take up a campus role. These were opportunities to meet people, gain confidence, learn things outside the classroom and build a CV.

The rule was too blunt. The institute admitted students with different cut-offs and very different levels of preparation. It cannot then design everything else as if those differences disappeared on day one. If the aim was to help students improve academically, shutting them out of other opportunities did not seem like much of a solution.

Sometimes, the filtering was even more direct. Certain companies explicitly used JEE rank as a filter during placements. This always seemed absurd to me. You could spend years taking the same courses and writing the same exams as everyone else, only to be filtered out because of an exam you had written before any of it.

What exactly were those years at IIT supposed to count for?

I do not have a neat solution to all of this. Not every reserved-category student needs academic help, and not every general-category student is doing well. Treating either group as a single block would create another version of the same problem.

But the institute could at least ask some basic questions. Where were the actual gaps? Which students were struggling, in which courses, and at what stage? What kind of teaching, mentoring or support would have helped?

And beyond academics, did the other rules on campus give students equal opportunities to grow, or did they keep filtering out the same people?

The hostel allotment was only the first time I noticed this pattern. The same entrance exam kept reappearing long after we had entered IIT, in conversations, grades, campus roles and even placements.

Perhaps it should not surprise us, then, that many IIT departments still have barely any faculty members from SC and ST communities, or that even some of the few who do become professors have reported experiencing caste discrimination.

We spend an enormous amount of time debating who should get into the IITs. Surely, what happens to students after they get in deserves just as much thought.