Caste at College

Only seven out of every 100 hundred teachers in colleges and universities across the country were from the Scheduled Castes last year. Those from the Scheduled Tribes were even worse off, numbering only 2 per cent.

According to the report released last month, only 1.02 lakh – or 7.22 per cent – of the 14.1 lakh teachers in 716 universities and 38,056 colleges in the country were Dalits, while tribal communities accounted for just 30,000 or 2.12 per cent.

The faculty figures fall far short of the national population of Scheduled Castes (16.6 per cent) and Scheduled Tribes (8.6 per cent).

In Bengal, the percentage of SC/ST teachers, according to the All India Survey on Higher Education Provisional Report for 2014-15, was even less – 6.27 per cent Dalit and 0.93 per cent from the Scheduled Tribes.

Delhi University executive council member Abha Dev Habib said that of the 813 faculty members, only 63 (7.7 per cent) were Dalits and 24 (less than 3 per cent) were from tribal groups. “Our teacher association has written to the HRD ministry and the UGC about non-implementation of reservation in DU. But no action has been taken,”

Sources in the human resource development ministry confirmed that none among the 43 central universities in the country had a Dalit vice-chancellor. Only one – the Indira Gandhi National Tribal University in Amarkantak, Madhya Pradesh – had a VC from an ST community, Professor T.V. Kattimani.

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