New Delhi: Less than 3% of those teaching at the Indian Institutes of Technology across the country are from reserved categories, the Centre has said. Of the 6,043 faculty members at the 23 IITs, 149 are from the Scheduled Castes and 21 from Scheduled Tribes, the Union Ministry of Human Resource Development has told the Lok Sabha. This means that 2.8% of the faculty members come from the reserved categories.
Minister Prakash Javadekar was responding to a question raised by Udit Raj, Lok Sabha BJP MP and chairman of the All India Confederation of SC/ST Organizations.
“Reservation in appointment of faculty in IITs is available only at entry level post of Assistant Professors and Lecturers in Science and Technology subjects. For faculty posts in subjects other than science and technology e.g. Humanities, Social Science and Management as well as non-faculty posts, reservation at standard rate of 15%, 7½ % and 27% for Scheduled Castes (SCs), Scheduled Tribes (STs) and Other Backward Classes (OBCs) respectively is fully applicable,” Javadekar has said.
Also read: Yes, the IITs Have a Gender Ratio Problem. Here’s How to Fix It.
According to the data provided by the HRD minister, IIT Dhanbad has the highest number of SC/ST faculty members, at 35. IIT Mandi does not have even a single faculty member from the reserved categories.
While there has been less talk about the diversity at IITs, scholars and alumni have been raising a similar problem at the Indian Institutes of Management for a while now. Researchers Deepak Malghan and Siddharth Joshi pointed out that of the 512 IIM faculty members they could gather information on, only two were from the SC category and there was not even a single ST. They trace this lack of diversity back to the post-graduate programmes at the IIMs – most faculty members have done the postgraduate from an IIM.