IIT Bombay Student Death: What Invoking The SC/ST Act Actually Means

Sahil Wakode, a second-year BTech student at IIT Bombay, was found dead in his hostel room on the Powai campus on the evening of September 18, hours after a mid-semester exam in which, according to an earlier institute statement, he was found using a phone. Police initially registered an accidental death report, a routine first step, and said no suicide note was recovered.

However, the case changed after his father alleged that Wakode had faced months of caste-based harassment from a professor. Police registered an abetment-to-suicide case and invoked the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989 — commonly called the SC/ST Act — against the professor.

The investigation was later handed to the Mumbai Crime Branch, and protests broke out on campus demanding accountability, even as IIT Bombay and a faculty forum pushed back, saying the professor had merely followed exam protocol after catching the student using ChatGPT during a test.

What The Act Covers

The SC/ST Act was passed in 1989 to address a specific gap: ordinary criminal law didn't adequately capture the particular cruelty of caste-based violence and humiliation. It creates a separate category of offenses, not just physical violence, but acts like public humiliation, forcing someone to eat or drink obnoxious substances, denying access to public resources, sexual exploitation, and deliberately insulting someone by their caste name in public view.

A 2015 amendment expanded the list further, adding offenses like garlanding with footwear, imposing social boycotts, and denying customary rights over land or water sources. The Act applies specifically when the victim belongs to a Scheduled Caste or Scheduled Tribe and the offense is committed because of that identity intent and context matter as much as the act itself.

How It Works

Cases under the Act are meant to move faster and hit harder than ordinary criminal cases. States are required to set up special courts to try these offenses exclusively, with the goal of speedy trials. Bail provisions are stricter, and most offenses are non-bailable.

The law also created a compensation and relief framework — victims' families are entitled to monetary relief, and in cases involving death, that compensation is significant, paid out even before conviction.

A 2018 Supreme Court ruling had briefly required a preliminary inquiry before an FIR could be filed and made arrests conditional on prior approval — but Parliament pushed back hard, passing an amendment that restored the original, more immediate mechanism: an FIR can be registered directly, and anticipatory bail is generally barred for those accused.

That's exactly the mechanism playing out in the Wakode case: the family's complaint was enough to trigger an FIR naming the professor and the institute's director, without a prior inquiry stage.

Why It Matters And Why It's Contested

Supporters of the Act argue it exists precisely because caste discrimination is often invisible to those who don't experience it, and ordinary law enforcement has a long history of treating caste-based harassment as personal conflict rather than systemic abuse. Making the Act's mechanisms swift and its bail provisions strict is meant to counter that historical indifference, and to signal that institutions — universities included — are not exempt.

Critics, including some courts, have periodically raised concerns about misuse: FIRs filed to escalate ordinary disputes, or invoked before facts are established, which can derail a person's life and career if the eventual acquittal rate remains high (which national data has repeatedly shown to be a real pattern).

This tension between protecting genuinely vulnerable communities and guarding against wrongful accusations is unresolved and shows up in almost every high-profile invocation of the law, campus deaths included.

What makes the Wakode case, and others like it, so charged is that they sit exactly at that fault line: a grieving family invoking the law's full weight against an institution that denies wrongdoing, while investigators are left to establish, case by case, whether what happened was tragedy, negligence, discrimination, or some combination the law wasn't built to cleanly separate.