UGC Equity Regulations Protests And The Myth Of Upper-Caste Victimhood

The University Grants Commission (UGC) has introduced the Equity Regulations to address caste-based discrimination faced by students from reserved categories in higher education institutions (HEIs). While discrimination has been constitutionally prohibited since 1950, it remained strikingly absent from formal education policy for decades.

As sociologist Satish Deshpande has pointed out, until the 2010s—more than sixty years after the Constitution guaranteed Indians the right to live free from discrimination—no national education policy document even acknowledged discrimination in the sense the 2026 Regulations now do. In that sense, these regulations mark a historic break.

The new rules mandate that all universities and colleges establish an Equal Opportunity Centre (EOC) along with campus-level equity committees tasked with inquiring into complaints of discrimination and promoting inclusion. These committees must include representatives from Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, Other Backward Classes (OBCs), persons with disabilities, and women.

Equity Regulations Are Rohith Vemula’s Legacy

The objective, according to the regulation’s proponents, is to move beyond the largely advisory 2012 guidelines and create a binding, institutional mechanism for grievance redressal and accountability.

The regulations were framed following a Supreme Court directive in a case seeking implementation of the 2012 anti-discrimination rules. The petition was filed by the mothers of Rohith Vemula and Payal Tadvi—both of whom died by suicide after allegedly facing sustained caste-based harassment in separate institutions. Their deaths, and the institutional silence that followed, laid bare the inadequacy of voluntary or symbolic safeguards.

Yet, instead of being welcomed as a long-overdue corrective, the regulations have triggered widespread protests. The scale and tenor of the backlash—particularly from upper-caste Hindu groups and supporters of the Modi government—recall the fury that followed the implementation of the Mandal Commission recommendations in the early 1990s. Once again, a limited attempt to address structural inequality has been framed as an existential threat to merit and fairness.

A protest outside the UGC headquarters, led by a group calling itself “Savarna Sena,” has become emblematic of this resistance. Protesters argue that the regulations fail to provide an explicit grievance mechanism for general category students and could, paradoxically, deepen inequality. To support their claim, they cite data showing that complaints of caste discrimination rose from about 173 cases in 2016–17 to over 350 in the 2023–24 academic year—without acknowledging that rising complaints may reflect greater reporting rather than increased incidence.

A petition has since been filed in the Supreme Court contending that the regulations are discriminatory because they do not explicitly extend the same grievance redressal framework to general category students. The Court has agreed to hear the petition, placing the regulations under judicial scrutiny even as protests continue.

Why the equity rules have put the Centre in a spot

The controversy has placed the BJP in a familiar bind. The party has spent years courting OBCs and Dalits while continuing to rely on upper-caste Hindus as its core electoral base. It has repeatedly highlighted efforts to expand OBC representation in government and within party structures. At the same time, it remains acutely aware that any perception of caste conflict will be seized upon by the Congress to revive its claim that the Modi government has failed to ensure adequate representation for SCs, STs, and OBCs at the highest levels of power.

This line of attack hurt the BJP during the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, particularly the charge that a strong BJP government would “alter” the Constitution. The recent announcement of a caste census is best understood as an attempt to recover lost ground and signal renewed commitment to social justice.

The Equity Regulations have therefore left the Modi government walking a tightrope. It cannot afford to alienate upper-caste voters, nor can it be seen as retreating from protections for historically marginalised communities. This explains the carefully calibrated response from the Union government. Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan has repeatedly emphasised that the regulations are court-mandated, constitutionally sound, and subject to judicial oversight—seeking safety in legality rather than political conviction.

Addressing concerns raised by protesting students, Pradhan said the rules were being implemented strictly within the constitutional framework and under the supervision of the Supreme Court. “I want to very humbly assure everyone that this entire process is within the framework of the Constitution,” he said. “No injustice will be done to anyone, and no one will be able to misuse this law.”

Facts on the ground tell a different story

What the uproar over the UGC’s Equity Regulations ultimately obscures is a simple but inconvenient fact: formal equality cannot compensate for profoundly unequal social conditions.

The vehemence with which these regulations have been opposed far exceeds their actual scope. A set of rules that merely replaces a weak, advisory framework with mandatory institutional safeguards has been cast as a civilisational threat. That this alarm has been amplified by sections of the academic elite which is mostly upper caste only underscores how deeply entrenched privilege remains within India’s universities.

The central claim of the critics—that protections for marginalised students will inevitably be misused against dominant castes—rests on a fictional account of power. It assumes that SC, ST and OBC students, who together constitute nearly 85 per cent of the population, already exercise disproportionate influence within higher education. The empirical record tells a very different story.

Official data placed before Parliament reveals chronic underrepresentation of these communities, particularly in faculty positions. Of the 423 professor posts sanctioned for OBCs in central universities, only 84 have been filled. The situation is even more stark for Scheduled Tribes, where 83 per cent of sanctioned posts remain vacant, and for Scheduled Castes, where nearly two-thirds of posts lie unfilled. These are not marginal gaps but structural absences that shape everyday academic life.

Student outcomes reflect the same imbalance. Data tabled in the Lok Sabha in December 2023 show that more than 13,500 SC, ST and OBC students dropped out of central universities, IITs and IIMs over the past five years. Dropout figures are often treated as neutral statistics, but they are in fact social indicators. Persistent humiliation, heightened surveillance, isolation and exclusion rarely announce themselves as discrimination; they accumulate quietly, until departure becomes the only option.

In this context, the claim that equity regulations threaten merit or fairness collapses under scrutiny. What these rules attempt to do is not to tilt the playing field but to acknowledge that it has never been level to begin with. To mistake minimal safeguards for preferential treatment is to confuse dominance with neutrality—and to mistake the absence of accountability for academic freedom.