Secret of success

Social disadvantage and language barriers prevent students from disempowered backgrounds, especially those educated in Indian languages, from keeping pace with their lessons. Indeed, where the medium of instruction is English, students schooled in the sciences in an Indian language are automatically disadvantaged, and there is a limit to which they can use mathematics and symbolic logic to communicate. Switching the medium of instruction to Hindi would not erase inequity, since only about a quarter of Indians speak it natively. The logical alternative, to provide supportive education in English, is practised at some IITs, but not in Roorkee. A system of mentoring by senior students has been put in place recently, but such non-formal support is never failsafe. Besides, inequalities are not merely academic, but cultural. A student who likes Muddy Waters generally fares better socially than one who likes Bollywood music. And the recent controversy in IIT Madras over the Ambedkar Periyar Study Circle suggests that administrations are not wholly unmindful of caste.

Unfortunately, reservation is all too frequently seen as a binary opposed to merit. In technical education, dire consequences are predicted: surgeons who remove the wrong organ and civil engineers who cannot build in right angles, simply because they were cut too much slack on account of their background. But this either/ or logic is crude and there is no real bar to reservation producing merit through extended support systems. Reservations give disadvantaged students an edge at the level of the entrance examination, but once students are in the IIT system, they are treated at par. However, while continuing to treat students equally, the administration may wish to bolster the self-esteem of those who fail to communicate effectively by extending cultural and language support.