Manufactured Merit, Neoliberalism & Caste Discrimination: Three Evils of Higher Education in India

Research Associates, Indian Researcher | January 27, 2022 | Published Online

A Very Short Introduction to Savarna Merit

Access to quality education remains an important factor to attain mobility in terms of finding entry into aspired occupations, in terms of social dignity, and most importantly in terms of breaking down the barriers imposed by the discriminatory practices of caste and gender hierarchies in the Indian context.

This note focuses on the duality that is inherent within the nature of caste discrimination in contemporary India, and specifically with the question of access to ‘quality education’ in the realm of Higher educational services in mind. This aforementioned duality reveals itself in two folds: First, historically, one’s caste location itself enables certain mobility (and therefore for others, their caste location can become a deterrent to such mobilities) in terms of ‘social capital’ and/or ‘cultural capital’. Second, the act of denial of such a ‘caste to mobility’ relationship can then reinstate the age-old Manu-vaadi or Varna based hierarchies, where access to higher education, preserving and restructuring the pedagogic practices, and reproducing the ‘knowledge system’ itself can become the act of an ‘exclusive society’, of the Savarna (or the ‘upper’ castes) society to be specific. 

In the contemporary Indian context, we observe both of these facets of discrimination being constantly reiterated in the field of Higher education, more importantly, in spaces, which are regarded as institutes or universities of ‘eminence’. The syndrome of meritocracy has become systemic. Anecdotal evidence of professors using casteist slurs or Dalit students being expelled from the classroom space in such institutes is not rare^[1] . Historically, with lack of access to means of production (particularly land) and eventually becoming a large pool of ‘attached labourers’ have constrained the Dalit-Adivasi population in this country to remain invisible and excluded in the sphere of so-called knowledge production (Benjamin 2008, Thorat and Neuman 2012). The identity of a Dalit or an Adivasi person in India is reduced to a readily associated image of ‘menial jobs’, or even worse, with untouchability that still prevails in several parts of India. To counter this reactionary and inhumane force of ‘Hindutva’ (largely rooted in Manu), some revolutionary attempts have also been made, one of which still remains relevant to our discussion in this piece, i.e. is the ‘reservation’ for the underprivileged section in numerous positions within the academia (Subramanian 2019).       

At this outset, we would like to probe into the existing idea of meritocracy that essentially draws from these two-faced problems emerging out of academia. We also aim to hint at the processes that enables the continuation of these discriminatory practices in the premier higher educational institutes in India. 

The note is divided into four broad sections. In the second section, we describe a brief history of the IITs and how merit became equivalent to the enrolment in such institutes. In the third section, we introduce a new dataset which has been collated from the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha official replies on PhD admission in the IITs, and in the final section we present an analysis of the two pronged process of caste discrimination and the disastrous push towards the neoliberal policies in education.  

2. Nation Building to Software Building: How IIT Equals to Merit in Contemporary India

The subject of this study is focused on the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in India. There are 23 IITs in total as of the current date, some of which are newly formed in the last 5 years whereas some date back to the immediate post-independence decade. The initial vision with which these Institutes were formed contains a certain ideological direction of the Nehruvian era. In her seminal work titled The Caste of Merit: Engineering Education in India, Ajanta Subramanian has explored  this vision of the ‘original five’:

“…the IITs were set apart as the uppermost echelon of a stratified postcolonial structure of technical training. Deemed “institutions of national importance” by the Institutes of Technology Act of 1961 the IITs’ standing was guaranteed by a set of exceptions.” (Subramanian 2019). 

This excellence building along with the vision of ‘nation building’ from a technocratic understanding of development eventually evolved into three particular dimensions of ‘meritocracy’ in the 1980s, when the Indian economic policies shifted towards a more neoliberal path. Consumer culture also entered the realm of education, a degree in engineering, or even a PhD, now had to be associated with a certain brand of ‘institutes’.  

The first dimension is that of a cultural consumer/consumption phenomenon. In popular terms, the majority of the citizens take a unified stand on the ‘supreme’ and ‘absolute’ (or innate) abilities of engineers and scholars from the IITs. Therefore, when India started becoming a ‘back-office’ for the global IT revolution, highly paid personnel with an IIT degree became a desirable commodity (their labour services with the skill being the commodity here) for the ‘consumer base’ that was created through the ‘Silicon valley’ job opportunities. 

The Second dimension, which could be identified as the popular obsession with the‘Joint Entrance Examination’ conjoined with the ‘software’ dream that the Indian government had ushered in already. Numerous students from (8th to 10th grade onwards) started taking a specifically modelled ‘coaching’ to ‘crack’ the JEE’. The Kota coaching industry or the aspirants from Andhra Pradesh and Telangana enmass flocking to entrance coaching centers based in and around Hyderabad attest to that social trend. This particular coaching-tutorial has created huge private capital based merit making enterprises.  

The third, and probably the most important dimension, is that the consideration of this merit, manufactured through private coaching or historically accumulated social-cultural capital of the upper castes (mostly male) is often absent across popular narratives. And, caste based reservation (or the democratic principles of equitable access to education) is conveniently interpreted as a hindrance for the so-called ‘meritorious’ upper caste students, who could not get admission at the IITs because of the seats occupied by the reserved category students.      

Throughout the shift from a ‘nation building’ ideologue to a preferred community construction of ‘software making’ NRI professionals, the systemic bias against the Dalit-Adivasi students never got rectified, if not worsened. Meanwhile, the oppressive discourse of ‘meritocracy’ grew to such proportions within popular public understanding that a recent report in the Economist^[2] even goes on to explain `why the Brahmins are CEOs in the USA and not in India, quite unequivocally holding the caste based reservation system responsible for such a development. 

3. Features of Caste Discrimination in the IITs: An Exploration 

The existing official databases don’t provide enough information on the IIT admission by caste categories. Therefore the Indian Researcher has compiled a unique database on PhD admissions at IITs from the Loksabha and Rajya Sabha replies over the last few years (Data can be accessed here: https://bit.ly/3rt8pPf). There are several popular media reports which have already used snippets of these replies, however, this publicly available database is not analysed temporally, which makes the current analysis an addition to the existing sources. 

a) Representational Inequality in IIT Admission in PhD Courses 

Representational inequality can be understood as a comparison of the ‘norm’ and ‘actual’ representation in the IIT admissions. In the Higher education sector, the UGC guideline^[3] for reservations suggests that 15% of the seats be reserved for SC students and 7.5% of the seats be reserved for the ST students. If we compare the last five years (2015-2019) admissions data of IITs, the percentage of SC students admitted on an average is around 9 per cent. The situation is quite grim when it comes to the ST students, whose proportion in admission is below 3 per cent.  

This glaring representational inequality then suggests that in 100 seats at least 15 seats are to be filled by the SC students, while on an average 6 seats still remain vacant. And the same forced vacancy for the ST students is seen by 5 seats remaining vacant out of 7.5 allotted as a minimum. 

Clearly violating the reservation norms for SC-ST students while an overarching representation for the ‘other’ caste students could be seen from the admission data presented here. As a control group for this phenomenon, when one compares the same with the central universities, we observe why systemic bias is inherent to the ‘merit’ making industry of IITs. 

In figure 2, we have taken central universities outside North Eastern States to account for the parallel figures with respect to the IITs, which are also situated in these parts of India with the only exception of IIT Guwahati . Here, the admissions data of central universities (2016-2021) suggest that for both SC and ST reservation norms, the representation is much more equitable. One of the many reasons could also be attributed to the constant struggles of the Ambedkarite and the Leftist student outfits who can hold the authorities accountable, a political practice which is largely lacking in the IIT campuses.  

b) Invisibilisation of Caste: The Fallacies of Hard Work Theorem

This systemic bias present in the IITs is often characterised by the ‘Chetan Bhagat syndrome’. The STEM (Science Technology Engineering Management) based courses require the so-called ‘hard working’ students to get admitted in the IITs, who can then pursue apolitical dreams of ‘development’. The better implementation of reservation norms in central universities can be attributed to the non-STEM courses, and therefore one might argue that the ‘NON STEM’ courses can become a better place of representation even for IITs. What we observe here is that the IITs over time have become places practicing systemic caste bias, be it in the STEM or the other courses. The fallacy of hard work have invisibilised the reality of caste discrimination. Courses, which are NON STEM also equally lack the equitable understanding of caste-based reservation. Using the 2020 admissions data by the departments at the IITs, we observe (Figure 3) that the representational inequality still persists within all the sections of these institutes.  

 4. Explaining the Manufactured Merit in Higher Education   

Arguments for ‘meritocracy’ often blurs the conditions in which merit is manufactured. With higher access to social and cultural capital, the mobility that the students from ‘other’ castes can afford is often reflected in their purchase of ‘educational services’ in the private markets. 

Table 1 shows the mean expenditure incurred for the private coaching by the currently enrolled students from different caste backgrounds. One can observe clearly that students from ‘other’ castes, who are above 15 years of age and are pursuing higher education (column 2), are already equipped with a much higher purchasing power that enables them to avail private coaching. This purchase capacity is double of what the SC students can afford and more than four times of what the ST students can afford on an average. This phenomenon of skill acquiring through private markets and then getting admitted in the higher educational institutes is what we are referring to as manufactured merit. The invisibilisation of this process and a simultaneous vilification of the reservation norms in popular rhetoric naturally jeopardise the envisioned ‘equitable’ access to education for the marginalised sections.  

5. How Neoliberalism Reinstates the Caste Discrimination in Higher Education: Way Forward 

The current New Educational Policy further promotes this environment. It necessitates that the higher educational institutes become centers for self-financed courses, it mandates that education remains a private market commodity. With the neoliberal narrative of aspiration and dreams, it promotes the manufactured merits at the cost of discriminating against thousands of Dalit and Adivasi students. In the beginning of this piece we have argued how casteism in these institutes of eminence have remained systemic at two levels:

First, the process of admission denies the age-old repression by not acknowledging the financial and social privileges that ‘savarna merit’ enjoys. Second, for the admission processes, the system creates a private capital oriented merit manufacturing complex, which denies access to the marginalised sections of the country. 

After 6 years of Rohith Vemula’s final letter to the country, it is important to recognise the fact that the current ruling dispensation and the upper caste brethren, who uphold ‘merit’ are also playing on the side of neoliberalism. To counter both these tendencies, we must build resistance by identifying the ‘canons’ of meritocracy which is coded by both the commodification of education as well as discrimination against the marginalised in the sphere of higher education in India.  

End-Notes

^[1]https://thewire.in/caste/caught-on-video-iit-kharagpur-faculty-abuses-sc-st-obc-students-and-those-with-disabilities; Also See: https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/parliament-proceedings-60-of-dropouts-at-7-iits-from-reserved-categories/article35752730.ece

^[2] Dilip Mondal’s piece on the Economist Article: https://theprint.in/opinion/the-economist-is-wrong-brahmins-become-ceos-in-us-not-because-of-quotas-in-india/797522/

^[3] See Guidelines Here https://www.ugc.ac.in/pdfnews/4130592_Guidelines-Reservation-Policy-of-the-Government.pdf

References

Benjamin., J (2008).  “Dalit and Higher Education in India.” The Indian Journal of Political Science. Vol. 69, No. 3 (JULY – SEPT., 2008), pp. 627-642. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41856451?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents

Thorat, S., & Neuman, K. S. (2012). Blocked by caste: Economic discrimination in modern India. Oxford University Press. 

Subramanian, A. (2019). The caste of merit: Engineering education in India. Harvard University Press.