43 IIT Kharagpur departments don’t have ST faculty; 34 PhD seats denied to SC, ST, OBC: APPSC

NEW DELHI : As many as 43 departments in the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kharagpur do not have faculty from Scheduled Tribe (ST), the Ambedkar Periyar Phule Study Circle found in an RTI reply. It also revealed that 34 seats were denied to candidates belonging to ST, Scheduled Caste (SC), and Other Backward Classes (OBC) in PhD admissions last year.

Besides departments lacking ST faculty, 32 do not have SC faculty and 23 do not have a single OBC faculty currently. Overall, there are 683 faculty members from the general category, 40 from OBC, 17 from SC, and two from ST.

Also read IIT Delhi denies 132 PhD seats to SC, ST, OBC candidates: APPSC finds

Alleging violation of reservation norms in faculty recruitment and PhD admissions in the institute, APPSC further informed that data obtained through RTI reply showed no ST faculty was appointed and no female faculty belonging to the reserved categories was recruited in 2023 in IIT KGP. 23 departments lacked SC, ST, OBC faculty members last year, it found.

IIT Kharagpur PhD Admissions

The number of reserved category candidates who applied for admission to PhD admissions, got selected for interview, interview, selected, and denied seats is as follows:

Further, the data obtained by IIT Kharagpur showed that only three departments have female OBC faculty, and two have female SC faculty as on January 29, 2024. In the case of male faculty, only two departments have ST faculty, it showed. Moreover, 20 departments do not have a single male faculty from the SC, ST, and OBC categories.

“The lack of representation in the faculties is responsible for the violation of reservation, lack of support for students from marginalized communities and everyday harassment and discrimination they face, often leading to suicides. It is institutional violence on them,” APPSC said in a post on X.