Equity Without History: The UGC Norm Proposals Through An Adivasi Lens

Discrimination faced by Scheduled Tribes (ST) and Scheduled Castes (SC) does not begin at the university gate. But it is produced across the education system, from schooling to college, and is reproduced within higher education through everyday practices, institutional silence, and selective accountability. Writing from my own experience as an Adivasi who has navigated discrimination from school through higher education and continues to encounter it even after exiting the education system, this article argues that exclusion is not episodic but systemic. Equity without history risks becoming procedural language that obscures the structural realities it purports to redress.

I was born and raised in Ranchi, Jharkhand. My parents had government jobs, which gave me the privilege of attending a private school, a rare opportunity in my community. Yet even this privilege did not protect me from discrimination. The course of exclusion began the moment I stepped outside my community’s protective cocoon and entered the school. Teachers, overwhelmingly upper-caste, ingrained in us a narrative: Adivasis cannot excel academically; we are good only in sports or dance. School plays and concerts cast Adivasi and Dalit students as animals, trees, and mountains, not protagonists, and these roles were assigned based on colour and caste, not talent.

This everyday marginalisation wasn’t just symbolic. It shaped how we saw ourselves and how we believed the world saw us. Our interest in education faded; we internalised the idea that education isn’t for us.

When I entered university at Banaras Hindu University (BHU) and later at TISS, I initially believed I had a fresh start. At BHU, I did not face overt discrimination in classrooms, as I was told partly because I did not look adivasi enough: my name is generic, I dressed well, and my manner of speaking enabled me to slip through the cracks of caste profiling.  However, the hostel allotment system identified me as ST and segregated me from other general students within the same hostel. This was one of my earliest encounters with institutional categorisation that treated reservation as segregation rather than support.

It is also important to look at intersectionality and gender discrimination. At BHU, the administrative response to safety issues revealed further fractures. The male hostel didn't have an entry time, but the female hostels had an entry timing 7 pm. After a female student was harassed while returning to her hostel at night in 2019, the administration blamed the survivor and resisted reform. Only sustained protest led to modest changes in curfew hours, not because the institution acknowledged structural issues, but because students forced its hand. But again, the safety of women on campus was still a question. 

At TISS, I saw another pattern: upper-caste peers who dated SC/ST students often used those relationships to signal their own progressiveness, sometimes weaving caste research into their academic portfolios. In contrast, the real concerns of SC/ST students remained largely unaddressed, with high dropout rates, delays in scholarship, and lack of institutional support. These were not isolated incidents but patterns that reflect the normalisation of caste discrimination in educational spaces.

Any discussion of “equity” in higher education must begin by recognising that Adivasi (ST) and Dalit (SC) engagements with formal education emerge from fundamentally different historical trajectories. Treating these groups as interchangeable “beneficiaries” of inclusion policies erases the political histories that shape their relationship with education  and reproduces exclusion in the name of neutrality. 

Dalit movements in India have a long, explicit, and politicised engagement with education. For Dalit communities, education has historically been articulated as a tool of resistance against caste slavery. Dr B.R. Ambedkar’s call to “Educate, Organise, Agitate” positioned education not merely as individual upliftment but as collective political struggle a means to challenge Brahmanical dominance, claim dignity, and assert rights within a caste-stratified society. Access to education was demanded as a counter to enforced ignorance, untouchability, and exclusion from knowledge systems that had long been monopolised by upper castes.

Adivasi histories, by contrast, reflect systematic exclusion rather than politicised access. Formal education did not emerge from within Adivasi movements as a site of resistance in the same way; it was largely introduced through missionary interventions and state-led assimilation projects. These systems framed Adivasi communities as “backward,” “primitive,” or “in need of civilising,” rather than as peoples dispossessed through land alienation, displacement, and colonial extraction. Adivasi knowledge systems rooted in land, ecology, language, and community governance  were devalued, while schooling became a tool for cultural erasure rather than empowerment.

As a result education has historically functioned as a political weapon for Dalit assertion and Adivasi engagement with formal education has been shaped by uprooting, loss of language and culture, dislocation and systematic neglect. Entry into school and colleges dosent mean entry into power but into institution that demanded assimilation while refusing recognition.

The UGC Equity Regulations, 2026: A New Architecture For Inclusion

In January 2026, University Grants Commission (UGC) notified the Promotion of Equity in Higher Education Institutions Regulations, 2026, replacing an advisory anti-discrimination framework from 2012 with a more binding regulatory structure. These rules seek to curb discrimination based on identity, including caste/tribe, religion, gender, disability, and place of birth, and to ensure equitable access and treatment for students and staff in higher education. 

Under the 2026 regulations, higher education institutions must establish Equal Opportunity Centres (EOCs) to receive complaints, monitor campus practices, promote awareness, and support affected individuals. Each EOC is to be backed by an Equity Committee, chaired by the institution’s head (Vice-Chancellor or Principal), with members representing Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, Other Backward Classes, women, persons with disabilities, faculty, staff, and students. These committees are responsible for grievance redressal mechanisms with mandated timelines and protections against retaliation. The regulations also call for additional structures such as Equity Squads and Equity Ambassadors to monitor campus environments and serve as focal points for reporting issues. 

Importantly, the 2026 framework shifts equity from an advisory principle to an enforceable mandate: non-compliance can lead to sanctions such as loss of UGC funding, prohibition from offering certain programmes, or even derecognition of institutions. 

The Data Gap: What Is Measured  and What Is Not

If regulation is to be effective, it needs to be grounded in data. Yet when asked in Parliament whether there is centralised data on discrimination against SC/ST students in educational institutions, the Government of India admitted that no such data exists. This includes central universities, IITs, AIIMS and other public institutions: no central repository tracks discrimination incidents specifically in education. 

This absence of data is telling in itself. It reflects how the state fails to recognise and quantify systemic exclusion within educational spaces, even as it acknowledges legal frameworks like the Protection of Civil Rights Act, 1955 and the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989, that seek to penalise untouchability-related practices and ensure safety and dignity for SC/ST individuals. 

Even broader data on caste-based violence illustrates the wider context of social hostility: figures compiled by the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) show a significant rise in crimes against Scheduled Tribes over the past decade, including thousands of registered cases each year. This is a societal backdrop of exclusion and violence that cannot be separated from experiences of discrimination within educational institutions. (Note: NCRB data does not specifically disaggregate campus discrimination but signals the wider social environment in which institutions operate.) 

Further, the UGC’s own data presented to the Supreme Court and Parliament show that reported cases of caste-based discrimination in HEIs rose from 173 in 2019–20 to 378 in 2023–24, an increase of 118.4% over five years. Pending cases also climbed over the same period. These numbers may still represent a fraction of lived experiences, given barriers to reporting and institutional reluctance to classify incidents as discrimination.

Institutional Silence And Selective Accountability

Taken on its own, reported cases offer only a partial view. Real exclusion often persists in the everyday culture of campuses, in patterns of interaction, in the silence around caste hierarchies, and in institutions' tendency to prioritise reputation management over social justice.

A case from St Xavier’s College, Ranchi, illustrates this dynamic. In November 2025, a second-year student posted on social media, critiquing how upper-caste students defined the college’s reputation while disparaging Adivasi peers. The post allegedly used derogatory language and questioned the presence of ST students in Jharkhand. Public outrage followed, and the student was suspended and issued an apology. But the institution did not constitute an independent committee to investigate bullying claims, nor did it initiate proceedings under the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act despite casteist content in the post. This institutional response stopped at reputational damage control, with no substantive inquiry into systemic exclusion.

This is not an isolated incident; it points to how institutions often treat discriminatory acts as individual problems rather than manifestations of structural hierarchies that require sustained redressal mechanisms. When the campus response stops at surface-level urgency, equity becomes procedural rather than transformative.

Equity Without History Reproduces Exclusion

The UGC Equity Regulations of 2026 represent a significant policy attempt to institutionalise anti-discrimination mechanisms in India’s higher education system. On paper, they introduce accountability structures and clear processes to address bias. Yet their effectiveness depends on whether they engage with the historical and structural roots of exclusion, the very forces that shape who feels at home in academic spaces, who sees themselves as rightful participants, and who is persistently othered.

Without historical grounding, equity can become a set of procedures, a compliance checklist that leaves untouched the cultural norms, everyday caste hierarchies, and institutional ambivalence that reproduce exclusion. This regulatory architecture, while necessary, does not interrogate why caste hierarchies persist in educational spaces, nor does it ensure that powerful gatekeepers inside those institutions are willing to confront their own histories and privileges.

Equity without history risks procedural inclusion, not transformative justice. It risks normalising exclusion in a softer language, a language that speaks of complaints and helplines, of committees and helplines, but not of redistribution of power, decolonisation of epistemologies, or accountability for systemic disadvantage.

Towards Transformative Equity

A meaningful equity agenda must understand that discrimination in higher education is rooted in broader social exclusion, historical marginalisation, and institutional practices that shield dominant groups. Regulations that do not acknowledge these foundations risk reifying the very hierarchies they seek to dismantle.

Equity is not just about mechanisms; it is about history, power, and accountability. Meaningful inclusion requires not only procedures for grievance redressal but active interventions that recognise the historical production of exclusion in curriculum, pedagogy, representation, campus life, and institutional culture. Without such grounding, equity becomes a procedural container that holds the language of inclusion but not its transformative promise.

Akriti Karishma Lakra is a decolonial feminist researcher based in Jharkhand  

(Views expressed are personal)