Lift income cap to fill lower-caste faculty posts, India told

Recruitment rules need to be changed to improve India’s staggeringly low faculty employment rates from the country’s largest lower-caste group, scholars have said.

India’s central universities currently employ only 4 per cent of researchers from the Other Backward Class (OBC) category as professors, despite the group making up 27 per cent of reserved spaces under its affirmative action system, according to recent news reports.

Introduced as a legal category in 1992, OBCs comprise a broad swathe of society. Roughly 35 per cent of Indians identify as OBC – a group that contains hundreds of sub-castes – compared with 25 per cent who identify as Scheduled Caste and 9 per cent Scheduled Tribe, according to estimates from the Pew Research Center.

Yet, despite being the country’s largest caste group, fewer OBCs work as professors or associate professors than members of the Scheduled Caste category, with recently reported figures showing only 60 OBC full professors at central universities.

The problem, academics said, relates partly to finances. Many potential candidates – ineligible under the current rules – come from the so-called creamy layer of this caste, earning above the 8 lakh (£7,500) annual income ceiling.

“Lifting of the income gap can be a good step to address this gap,” said Apoorvanand, a Hindi professor at Delhi University.

Suraj Yengde, a research associate in the department of African and African American studies at Harvard University and author of the book Caste Matters, agreed. He said that the difficulty comes as people from this caste run the gamut from “poor farmer to rich landlord”.

“These are rural people, the majority, they were not untouchables, but they were not well off. The argument you see is that the well-off groups also tend to fall into the OBC category,” he said.

But unlike the lowest rung of society, the OBCs fail to grab “people’s sympathies”, he believed.

“The mentality within the political party structures is that the OBCs are already privileged, so they may not get the benefits of SCs.”

Dr Yengde thought that a readjustment of income criteria was “absolutely” overdue.

“You’re basically excluding the majority [of OBCs]” under current conditions, he said.

He suggested that universities could do a “special recruitment drive” to bring in more lower caste faculty. But he cautioned that such efforts would do well to avoid unintentionally pitting the groups against one another.  

“If you do just OBC, the risk is, you might wind up isolating them,” he said.

pola.lem@timeshighereducation.com