More than 13,500 students from Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, and Other Backward Classes have dropped out of courses they were taking at Central Universities, Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), and Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) in the past five years, data tabled in Lok Sabha on December 4 showed.
The data was brought forward by Minister of State for Education, Subhas Sarkar, who was replying to a question by Bahujan Samaj Party MP Ritesh Pandey. While Mr. Pandey had also sought data on dropouts in National Law Universities, the Union government said NLUs were State Universities and hence, it did not have any data on the subject.
This comes amid hundreds of SC/ST/OBC students at these universities coming out with stories of caste-based discrimination that is both overt and covert after a string of student suicides across IITs in Mumbai, Delhi, and Madras in 2023, a majority of whom were from marginalised backgrounds.
