Reservations were implemented at the IITs many years after they were first enforced in other public colleges, the category marked separately so as to preserve “merit.” Merit, so far as IITs could see, resided solely in the elite castes, who made up almost 100% of all qualifying students, and not in the deep social inequalities embedded into Indian civilisation for millennia.Edwin Montagu, the secretary of state for India, had argued in 1918 that transferring any power to the Indians from the whites would simply be transferring power to a very narrow strand of upper-caste elites without any other relevant changes. Jawaharlal Nehru, who believed himself to be a casteless modernist, wanted to take India onto the global stage and justly considered engineering to be of immense importance.Perhaps to carve his point into stone, Nehru called engineering an act in the “spirit of Brahminic service” to the society. For hundreds and hundreds of years before the colonial administration made it a marker of high society, engineering in its older form was the domain of the Shudras, deemed unfit for the high-born elites. They were the architects, goldsmiths and the sculptors, educating themselves under hereditary guilds, studying mathematics, civil engineering and going under practical hands-on training, so that they could make the grand idols of the grand temples where they would be denied entry to worship their own god.Things have changed now. Engineering merit is the realm of the “upper” castes, born with natural talent, of “self-made” men and women who single handedly escape the middle class with their “hard work and brains”. This pool of greatness is supposedly being muddled through reservation.I did not know all this when I joined IIT Delhi. Born into an Other Backward Class (OBC) family in the poorest state of India, whispers of IITs had only recently reached the ears of my caste-class community. My parents thought of the IITs as this utopian place where anybody could reach if they studied enough – with the means that life and destiny gave them – and be transformed into someone with respect and material possessions.Also read: Sociology for the AryavratBeing from the 2020 batch, I encountered IIT online before I encountered it physically. Distance made it easier to construct an idealised version of the institution. So for a good while, I thought of IIT Delhi as this perfectly casteless, classless, egalitarian society. The director, deans and professors repeatedly asked us to let them know of any financial or social impediments during the hard times of the pandemic. They said that any requirement students needed in order to excel, however far-fetched, would be considered.The student-run clubs and boards had an elaborate vocabulary on inclusivity, equity and open-mindedness. Fill out the pronouns you want to be addressed by, one such club asked in a Google Form. When even gender identity was being addressed, caste must surely be a vestige of the past here, I thought, not aware of the heavy unsaid role it played in the attitudes and demographic composition of IITs and IITians.The Sarkar Committee, set up in 1945 to review the status of technical education in India, suggested the MIT model as the one to follow, with its mix of practical and theoretical sciences, mathematics and the humanities.Yet I found that while mathematics and theoretical sciences are seen as great endeavours, practical workshops were looked down upon as something inferior at worst, and with mild indifference at best. It is not a new notion. Ajantha Subramanian, in The Caste of Merit, discusses at length how the professionalisation of engineering helped create an English-educated technical elite, disproportionately drawn from socially privileged castes, while practical and manual forms of engineering knowledge remained socially devalued.The dignity of labour, despite all the modernisation, was still not realised. Nehru, acutely aware of the realities, quite explicitly said in a 1959 speech that “…even our engineers seem to think that their duty is to draw up plans while the manual jobs are left to the others below. Manual labour is considered beneath their dignity…the caste-system and the habit of living in compartments are different aspects of this”.Also read: There Is No ‘Harvard-Led Attack’ on IITs. So Why Is IIT Kanpur Entertaining the Idea?Humanities fare even worse – a strange inversion of the older hierarchy of knowledge, in which philosophical and literary learning carried enormous prestige among the “upper” castes, while engineering was relegated to the lower castes. IIT Delhi, after several years of comprehensive discussions, today has 10% humanities in its undergraduate engineering coursework as compared to MIT with its 24%.Seen as wildly unnecessary, a domain of the lesser-minded and a consolidating spot for all sorts of needlessly radical folk, the humanities often seem to be fighting a battle of survival. The crux of the argument is that the time of elite engineers should not be wasted on frivolous matters like sociology and history.There are many things one can question. One, some of the best engineering colleges, the MITs, Stanfords and CMUs of the world, hold humanities and practical coursework to be very crucial. They’ve also created a much more successful race of brilliant engineers who’ve built industrial capacity and ground-up innovation better than the IITs with their singular focus on theoretical sciences.Where has this focus led us in our nation-building campaign that was launched far back in the 1950s? I’d argue that an engineering education stripped of serious engagement with the humanities and the larger society produces technically accomplished elites who understand little about why they build things or whether their expertise serves a good purpose.Two, affirmative action does not impede progress itself. It is there in US universities with its race-conscious admissions, and it is also there in British universities. If anyone were to contest the impracticality of solutions used in the little United Kingdom to populous India, a look at China would show that they have their own preferential policies for ethnic minorities and regional disparities.So what really constitutes potential? Absolute marks on an examination that you’ve studied for two to five years that has no connection with the major you choose? Or should it consider other factors, like socio-economic conditions, the neighbourhood and exposure you got, and the psychological conditioning that exists subconsciously in the mind of your community?Also read: House Arrest, Detentions, FIRs: Protesters Say Police Harassing Those Demanding Justice For Sahil WakodeCaste is strangely under-recognised in IITs, by conservatives and liberals alike. Clubs and societies are based on anglicised elite-caste interests, and any attempts to create an indigenous version is seen as inherently inferior by the student elites. In another subversion of ancient hierarchies, non-elite-caste students raised on the Ramayana and Mahabharata are dismissed as backward and merit-less, while upper-caste elites exalt Greek epics brimming with Western cultural currency.Alienation sets in, sooner or later, in an environment that is so fundamentally hostile. While concerns like homophobia are considered at every minute step, caste is dismissed as a non-entity. The professors and the student elites, being from dominant castes and having lived in their own bubbles, possess no vocabulary to understand it. “I am casteless – I am simply Indian, and I’ve never seen casteism,” is the refrain.Anecdotal experience, and then institutional data, claims otherwise. The number of professors belonging to Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes or a designated backward class is strikingly low despite reservation policies and constitutional commitments to representation. In 2025, IIT Delhi had 642 faculty members, of whom 20 were from a Scheduled Caste and eight were from a Scheduled Tribe – about 3.1% and 1.2%, respectively.Students from marginalised categories entitled to reservation accounted for over 75% of all dropouts during 2016–21. Students from a Scheduled Caste or Scheduled Tribe are rarely elected as student representatives. While there are positions and committees meant to address representation concerns, as far as my experience tells, they exist because they have to exist.Questionable conferences and events pass scrutiny under the administration, and the recent case from IIT Mandi, where posters suggesting “Shudras should serve higher classes” were found around the campus, is a marker of the mindset that prevails over such events and the institution as a whole.Also read: IIT Mandi Director Claims to ‘Have Driven Out Evil Spirits’, Triggers RowThe entire system seemed hand-crafted for a very selective group of people: English-speaking, comfortably middle-class, urban Indians with Western socio-cultural currency. If you did not fit into this classification, you needed to be able to play the part. The nominally-liberal student elite that dominates campus discourse in elite institutions can make anyone who could not, or would not, play the part feel isolated.These problems are not exclusive to IITs. Neither is this an indictment of all and sundry from traditionally privileged castes. Had it not been for chance meetings with a string of extraordinary professors, possessing enough influence within the system and enough humanity to use it, things could have turned out very differently for me. The golden ticket I was told about by my parents did exist, but the system makes it look like an unintended by-product of all those other qualities.When the very fabric of thoughts, as discernible from the attitude towards humanities and practical coursework, is dirtied from the caste legacy of so many centuries, one can only assume the magnitude of work still needed. Perhaps the more productive question is not simply whether reservations should exist, but what kind of education system would make inherited inequalities less decisive in the first place.Shouldn’t we be asking why India concentrates so much educational prestige and investment at the summit of the pyramid while millions of children still lack access to decent schooling at its base? If the purpose is social mobility and nation building, wouldn’t the most important meritocracy be the one we build before the examination hall?Shrijit Shaswat is an IIT Delhi graduate with a deep interest in the faultlines of Indian society, from caste and social hierarchies to the very ideas that shape public life and imagination. He is from Bihar.