The University Grants Commission’s (UGC) Draft (Promotion of Equity in Higher Education Institutions) Regulations, 2025 purport to curb discrimination based on religion, race, caste, sex, or place of birth and to promote equity within Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). They, however, lack the necessarystrategic and operational interventionsmuch like a similar series of regulations in the past, which contained routine nominal measures.
Read Part One: Promotion of equity in HEIs: Will UGC’s 2025 draft regulation deliver?
Bureaucratic nature
The draft regulation for 2025 fails to address three key aspects pertaining to equity and the prevention of discrimination. First, its definition of ‘equity’ does not clearly articulate what equity means, and thus its core prescription of the Equal Opportunity Centre lacks the composition, rigour, and stipulations required to ensure equity. Second, the measures recommended for the promotion of equity are limited to campaigns and slogans and do not include any means to collectively address the various elements connected to equity.
Third, the bureaucratic nature of the recommended system and its responsive mechanism foster actions and penalties only in the aftermath of incidents of discrimination and consequent suicides. The proposed system does not include any provisions or interventions to cultivate the conditions and culture at all levels necessary for achieving equity and preventing caste-based discrimination.
The composition of the Equal Opportunity Centre reflects only bureaucracy. Having the head of the Institution as the chairperson, along with the underrepresentation of the most discriminated segments — only one member each from the SC and ST out of 10 members — will result in further injustice. To make it a just entity, it must be headed by a senior faculty member belonging to either the SC or ST categories. Additionally, of the ten members, at least six must belong to the SC or ST categories, and two must be from the OBC.
Holistic dimension of equity
The draft regulation assumes that “equity means a level playing field for all stakeholders with respect to entitlement and opportunity for the enjoyment of all legitimate rights.” In contrast, equity in education means identifying the conditions that cause inequity and eliminating those conditions and causes to ensure fairness and inclusion so that nothing whatsoever — including curriculum, pedagogy, teaching and learning, academic transactions, examinations, campus engagement, campus socialisation, and teacher-student interpersonal relations — hinders the achievement of students’ educational potential.
All students should be able to achieve the basic standard of education regardless of their social backgrounds. Will the Equal Opportunity Centre suffice to address the holistic dimension of ‘equity’? Are there any provisions in the stipulations of the draft regulation that ensure fairness and inclusion as described above?
Social inequality, and thus its effects on discrimination, are reproduced repeatedly in various forms by education. Curriculum and pedagogies are biased in terms of the subject matter of learning and teaching, reflecting the aspirations of the elite classes and castes. Moreover, pedagogies tend to align with the psychosocial conditions of the elites while disregarding those of the lower castes, which means pedagogies are neither inclusive nor individualised to ensure fairness.
The teacher-lower caste student interpersonal relationship is at times influenced by caste animosity, and may result in bias while marking exams, teaching and learning, and supervision of doctoral work. These innate inequities in academic functions are the basic causes of discrimination, dropouts, suicides, and other pathogenic conditions faced by the lowest of the low. Unless these core issues are resolved suitably, educational equity will remain a distant dream.
Lack of representation
Equity stems not only from alleviating all spheres of the educational ecosystem but also from deploying a diverse, well-balanced human resource capable of teaching students from all walks of life. This resource must be able to effectively address aspects of individualised education by understanding and responding to the psychosocial conditions of students from disadvantaged and marginalised social backgrounds in their learning, educational endeavors, and campus socialisation. This is critical to ensuring equity.
For instance, according to the Nature journal (2023), at top-tier IITs and the IISc, 98% of professors and more than 90% of assistant or associate professors are from privileged castes. Additionally, five out of the seven science schools at Jawaharlal Nehru University did not have a single Dalit professor.
Similar conditions prevail in other central universities, where, according to the Minister of State for Education, only 4% of professors working in 45 central universities belong to the OBCs, and only one vice chancellor each belongs to the SC and ST categories. This figure demonstrates that OBCs are also discriminated against on the grounds of their social identity.
The draft regulation, however, precludes OBCs from its definition of “caste-based discrimination.” This indicates that the faculty profile of higher education institutions (HEIs) is skewed toward members belonging to privileged upper castes, which is contrary to the norms necessary for achieving equity in serving students from lower castes.
Equity and the elimination of discrimination also encompass financial outlays aimed at uplifting and removing conditions that foster discrimination against socially disadvantaged communities. What the center has done in this respect is minuscule compared to what it is supposed to have accomplished.
The research portfolio has largely excluded both the SC/ST and OBC categories from receiving research grants. According to the Department of Science and Technology, as quoted in Nature (2023), 80% of the Post-Doctoral Research Fellowships under the INSPIRE scheme and 81% of the DST Tech Development and Transfer Division grants were awarded to the Forward Category during the period 2016– 2020. However, the draft regulation is silent on educational spending and research opportunities for the affected communities.
The weakest aspect of this regulation is the inclusion of “discrimination against the members of the economically weaker sections.” In the context of upper-caste-dominated educational establishments, do the regulators think that the plight of socially weaker sections is the same as that of economically weaker sections? Can the regulators justify what sort of discrimination, atrocities, or violence the economically weaker sections face within the jurisdictions of higher education institutions (HEIs)?
This regulation is nothing but a manifestation of the NEP 2020, as claimed by the regulation makers (UGC), upon which it has been drafted. The design of the NEP, inter alia, is to dilute the issues faced by the majority of disadvantaged and marginalised groups by bringing them under a universal umbrella system or measure that often favors the privileged. The much-needed unique surgical interventions for the disadvantaged and marginalised are suppressed in NEP implementation.
Therefore, unless the ecosystem of higher education institutions (HEIs) is reframed in the context of the conditions causing various forms of discrimination — including segregation, poor psychophysical conditions, humiliation, alienation, lack of socialisation, and lack of social virtues on the part of teachers, peers, staff, and governance — equity in HEIs will remain only a slogan used by political establishments.
Any serious intervention that claims to assure ‘equity’ for historically and socially oppressed students in higher education must include comprehensive interventions, socially and educationally, supported by suitable laws and legislation. From a legal perspective, similar to the Prohibition of Ragging Act, 2011, which prohibits and penalises ragging in educational institutions, a special law prohibiting and penalising caste-based discrimination can be enacted.
Equity measures, however, should be able to identify caste-based discrimination as micro-insults, micro-assaults, micro-depression, micro-oppression, micro-validations, and a micro-aggressive ecosystem, thus ensuring that these are eliminated from the face of HEIs through appropriate measures. Overall, equity measures must help eliminate the caste-based helplessness and disadvantages faced by victims upon entering the portals of higher education.
(We welcome your suggestions and feedback regarding Education. You can email us at education@thehindu.co.in)
Prof. Jawahar Nesan was until recently the Vice Chancellor of JSS Science & Technology University, Mysuru (a Karnataka Govt aided university), and previously the Vice Chancellor of Saveetha University at Chennai.
Published – March 14, 2025 05:05 pm IST
