9 IIMS violating reservation norms in PhD admissions, says IIT Bombay group

Mumbai: According to data collected through an RTI request made by the students' collective Ambedkar Periyar Phule Study Circle (APPSC) at IIT Bombay, nine Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) have been breaking the rules on reservations in Ph.D. admissions for the past five years.

In the most recent five years, 188 students from the Scheduled Caste (SC), Scheduled Tribe (ST), and Other Backward Caste (OBC) categories were denied admission, according to RTI data gathered from IIMs (2018 to 2022). Nine IIMs only admitted 5.4 percent of SC students, 1.8 percent of ST students, and 16.7 percent of OBC students. The general category, which includes EWS students, contained the majority of students (76.1%), according to data released by the IIT Bombay students' collective.

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110 seats are set aside for SC, 55 for ST, and 199 for OBCs, per IIM reservation guidelines. Between 2018 and 2022, the IIMs only admitted 123 OBC, 40 SC, and 13 ST, students.

“...188 Dalit Bahujan Adivasi students were denied their rightful seats in the last 5 years,” said the students collective on Twitter, while tagging the Union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan and National Commission for Backward Classes (NCBC)

IITs have also been slammed for similar data with only 2.5% of ST students being admitted to the premier institutions in 2021, according to a Lok Sabha response. Data compiled by ChintaBAR, an independent student organisation recognised, by IIT Madras, from the ministry of education (MoE), shows that "the intake is disproportionately skewed against students from SC/ST/OBC communities."