University Body UGC Needs “Teeth” To Tackle Caste Discrimination In Colleges: Top Court

New Delhi:

The Supreme Court on Friday called for a “robust mechanism to tackle” the issue of caste-based discrimination in higher educational institutions like IIMs and IITs. The court also lamented the “extremely unfortunate” incidents – 18 in the past 14 months – of suicide in these universities.

A bench of Justice Surya Kant and N Kotiswar Singh observed the UGC, or the University Grants Commission, “must be given teeth” to prescribe punitive punishment in such cases.

“We will create a robust mechanism to tackle the issue. We will take things to a logical conclusion,” the court told the petitioners – the mothers of Rohit Vemula (a PhD scholar at a Hyderabad university who died by suicide in 2016) and Payal Tadvi (a medical student at Mumbai’s TN Topiwala National Medical College, who died, also by suicide, in 2019).

The court then posted the next hearing after eight weeks.

Both Mr Vemula and Ms Tadvi faced caste-based discrimination. Their deaths made national headlines and triggered a furious social and political row but, as the months passed, their stories slipped out of focus, to be replaced by other horrific reports of violence and abuse.