India’s premier academic institutions have increasingly turned into hostile grounds for students from marginalised backgrounds, particularly Dalits, Adivasis, and OBCs. The tragic death by suicide of IIT Bombay student Sahil Wakode has provoked deep anguish and student outrage, yet the debate that followed followed a painfully familiar pattern of immediate polarisation. While campus authorities alleged that Sahil was found using a mobile phone to cheat during examinations, his family and peers allege systematic harassment and the use of casteist slurs by a faculty member.
The tragic reality is that suicide on these elite campuses is rarely an isolated tragedy. Since Rohith Vemula’s institutional death sparked a nationwide awakening, the systemic response of higher education has largely been to clamp down on dissent rather than address prejudice. Questioning authority has become a liability. Students increasingly fear expressing grievances openly, left with little choice but to blend into crowds under the wary surveillance of administrations eager to silence campus mobilisation.
India’s educational apparatus remains shadowed by traditional hierarchies—a modern echo of Dronacharya, demanding quiet compliance from those who dare to enter elite spaces. A Dalit or Adivasi scholar often enters an institute after overcoming immense socioeconomic hardship. Even for those whose parents secured stable government employment, generational entry into the middle class does not insulate them from structural bias. Instead, it saddles them with a double burden: the exhausting imperative to repeatedly validate their presence, and constant exposure to casual or overt hostility.
Compounding this crisis is the near-total collapse of institutional redress. Grievance redressal bodies and SC/ST cells are frequently hollow formalities—sterile committees that treat serious allegations of caste discrimination as administrative inconveniences. These bodies exist to provide procedural legitimacy to official decisions rather than to offer empathy or justice. Stripped of authentic democratic platforms, marginalised students endure severe isolation. Many arrive as migrants to alienating metropolitan centers, bearing the emotional toll of prejudice in environments that offer no sanctuary.
This systemic alienation is underscored by grim data. Media investigations indicate that student suicides across Indian Institutes of Technology have risen sharply over the past two decades—a tragic trend that has accelerated in the last ten years as funding models shift, pressure mounts, and campuses grow increasingly corporatised.
Amid this, the rhetoric of "merit" continues to serve as an ideological shield for hegemony. Rather than nurturing a diverse intellectual climate, elite academies frequently invoke "merit" to justify social exclusion, dismissing the rising aspirations of scholars from marginalised communities. Meanwhile, state support recedes in favor of corporate alignment, producing institutions heavily subsidised by public funds whose graduates often take their credentials straight abroad, leaving the domestic social compact behind.
Capitalism was once heralded as a modernising force that would dismantle traditional hierarchies in India’s boardrooms. Instead, corporate power has largely reproduced ancestral privilege, remaining deeply resistant to equitable representation. Our premier campuses now reflect this ethos, fostering cultural environments that alienate those outside dominant cultural norms.
Recent controversies illustrate this quiet homogenization. Segregated dining spaces dividing vegetarian and non-vegetarian students at premier institutes, or contentious curriculum materials emphasizing rigid varna hierarchies, send a clear message about who belongs. The intellectual direction of research at times pivots toward uncritical cultural revivalism, validating traditional orthodoxy under the guise of modern inquiry while marginalising critical social theory.
The public discourse offers a bitter contrast: leaders celebrate Dr. B.R. Ambedkar in political speeches, yet the radical core of his philosophy remains unwelcome inside lecture halls, relegated to ceremonial anniversaries while student-led discussions face bureaucratic hurdles.
While academic stress affects students across all backgrounds, marginalised students carry the unique weight of structural exclusion, dietary policing, and cultural prejudice on top of high-stakes academic demands. When internal grievance mechanisms exist, they often lack meaningful representation from SC, ST, and OBC faculty, leaving students with no credible allies inside the administrative machinery.
Homogenising our premier institutions will only gut their credibility. What is urgently needed is an impartial, transparent inquiry into Sahil Wakode’s death that treats allegations of discrimination with the gravity they demand. Mental health cannot be addressed in a vacuum that ignores the social realities of caste. Until our elite campuses institute independent, well-represented anti-discrimination safeguards and foster genuine intellectual and social diversity, they will continue to fail the very students India promised to elevate.
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*Human rights defender
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