SC notice to Centre, IITs on plea for implementing quota policy in recruitment, admission

The Supreme Court on Wednesday sought a response from the Centre on a plea for direction to all 23 IITs to implement the reservation policy in recruitment of faculty members and admission to research programmes.

The plea also sought a mechanism for resolving the problems faced by students, scholars and to decide their harassment complaints with transparency and in a time-bound manner.

A bench of Justices L N Rao, B R Gavai and B V Nagarathna also issued notice to all IITs on a petition filed by Dr Sachchida Nand Pandey, a geothermal energy researcher.

The petition filed through advocate Ashwani Kumar Dubey alleged that IITs were completely violating the reservation policy that provided quota to socially marginalised community belonging to the SCs, STs and OBCs.

It also claimed professors of the institutes regularly harassed the students and scholars due to absence of any proper mechanism to adjudicate the harassment complaints against them and management. Nearly 2400 students left IITs without completing their degrees due to harassment, caste discrimination and other unknown reasons, it said, citing news reports.

More than 50 students have lost their lives in IITs. However, the institutes never came up with any proper reason why these students ended their lives, it pointed out. The recent world rankings showed that none of the IITs found a position in the top 100 institutes or universities across the world.

In 2018, Parliament was informed that out of 6,043 faculty members across various IITs, 21 are from ST and 149 from SC, it said.

The petitioner also sought a direction to constitute a committee of technical experts to review the performance of existing faculty, cancel the appointment of non-performing ones.

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