Supreme Court advocate Disha Wadekar’s legal challenge to the new University Grants Commission (UGC) guidelines was an attempt to reshape how cases of discrimination were identified, reported and addressed within college campuses.
“At times, I think about what if, when I was in college, there had been an equal opportunity or redress mechanism,” she told The Telegraph Online. “Maybe things would have been different. Maybe I wouldn’t have been so scared.”
The absence of institutional safeguards, to her, was a legal problem. It brought her to the Supreme Court in 2019, seeking enforcement and strengthening of anti-discrimination regulations that she said existed for years but were never implemented.
It is this litigation that culminated in the UGC notifying the revised anti-discrimination guidelines in January, which the Supreme Court has put a stay on.
Wadekar’s mission started after the death of Dr Payal Tadvi, a junior resident doctor pursuing her postgraduate medical studies at TN Topiwala College, Mumbai. Tadvi died by suicide in May 2019.
Tadvi’s mother, Abida Tadvi, and husband, Salman Tadvi, made repeated written complaints to the college authorities, alleging targeted caste-based harassment by senior resident doctors, but no action was taken.
“These letters and representations are part of the police record,” Wadekar told The Telegraph Online. “Despite one year of consistent efforts, there was no action.”
Wadekar, who was already representing Radhika Vemula, the mother of Rohit Vemula, the Dalit PhD scholar who also died by suicide three years earlier at the Hyderabad Central University, represented the Tadvi family in the criminal case that followed.
But, Wadekar said, criminal prosecution after death could not address the larger issue.
“We often feel like we need to do something once a student takes their life. But we started asking what could have been done to prevent it.”
It was this question that led Wadekar and others working with the family to examine whether universities had any internal legal mechanism through which Payal could have gotten “some relief, safeguards or legal recourse”.
What Wadekar found was that while regulations against ragging and sexual harassment existed, along with a ragging committee, “Payal was specifically facing something that one would call institutional casteism or caste-based discrimination in the campus space.”
“But I really thought that this is not enough,” she said. "We started having conversations with Payal's mother, about what could be done for the larger issue of prevention of these forms of discrimination that happen in higher educational institutions, whether they are from your peers, or whether they are from the college authorities, or institutional discrimination, or whether it is discrimination that students face while interacting with the professors or faculty members.
In the course of that inquiry, Wadekar came across the UGC’s Promotion of Equity in Higher Educational Institutions Regulations, 2012. The regulations defined discrimination across multiple axes — caste, gender, religion, and disability — and mandated Equal Opportunity Cells within institutions.
“We were in 2019, and none of us had heard of these regulations,” she said. “Most people we spoke to didn’t even know they existed.”
According to Wadekar, the regulations were notable for the clarity with which they defined caste-based discrimination. They identified specific sites where discrimination manifested: Admissions, evaluation, hostels, scholarships, and extracurricular activities. But the framework, she argued, suffered from structural flaws.
The complaints mechanism was a single-member body, usually a professor employed by the institution. Appeals lay with the head of the institution. There was no external oversight, no monitoring authority, and no enforcement provision.
“Enforcement has been the core focus of our petition,” she said.
“The UGC has powers under its Act to enforce regulations,” Wadekar said. “Those powers were being used for ragging and sexual harassment regulations [Saksham regulations]. But not here.
“We realised that the sexual harassment regulations and the ragging regulations had much more stringent and procedural mechanisms. And it did not have all these flaws, like having a one-member body, an appeal going to the head of the institution or not having a monitoring mechanism. And most importantly, both the ragging regulations and the sexual harassment regulation had an enforcement clause.” she added.
Wadekar and her team filed right to information (RTI) applications with the UGC, seeking information from thousands of colleges and universities. The responses, she says, revealed widespread non-compliance.
“About 50 per cent of institutions did not even respond to whether they had implemented the regulations,” she said. “Many said they had zero complaints. Some said complaints were resolved by sending students for counselling.”
The findings, Wadekar said, pointed to “institutional apathy” and the “invisibilisation” of discrimination.
Along with Abida Tadvi and Radhika Vemula, she approached the Supreme Court with two primary prayers.
The first was enforcement: a direction to the UGC to introduce an inbuilt enforcement mechanism, similar to those under the ragging and sexual harassment frameworks, including powers to withdraw grants, derecognise institutions, or withdraw affiliations.
The second revolved around structural reform: inclusion of staff within the scope of protection, inclusion of OBCs within caste-based discrimination, replacement of the single-member inquiry officer with a multi-member committee, an independent oversight mechanism, and mandatory reporting to the police where penal provisions are attracted.
The apex court issued a notice to the UGC, asking for accountability. The UGC responded by constituting a committee to revise the regulations. Draft guidelines were submitted to the court in February 2025, to which Wadekar and the petitioners raised objections and submitted detailed suggestions.
In September 2025, the Supreme Court passed an order recording ten specific suggestions made by the petitioners and directed the UGC to revise the draft and notify the regulations.
The revised guidelines were notified on January 13, 2026.
The 2026 regulations, according to Wadekar, represent both “advancement and dilution”.
The positives include an expansion of the definition of an “aggrieved person” to include staff and even contractual workers, adding OBCs to the definition of caste-based discrimination, replacing a single-member body with a multi-member equity committee and the introduction of a non-compliance clause empowering the UGC to act against errant institutions.
The negative aspect of the guidelines were that it eliminates the detailed illustrations of how caste-based discrimination manifests, according to Wadekar.
“It is just left up to the equity committees, where they will have the discretion to tell you that this is discrimination and this is not discrimination,” she says. “There is no guiding principle.”
She argued that this discretion shifts to committees without clear benchmarks.
Protests have erupted across the country over the new guidelines because they are being seen as discriminatory towards general-category students and pointing fingers at upper-caste students as potential perpetrators of harassment.
Wadekar attributes this backlash to misinformation. “These are civil regulations,” she said. “No equity committee has the power to incarcerate anyone.”
She said that penalties under the framework can include undertakings, apologies, transfers, suspension, termination or rustication in extreme cases.
Criminal law, she said, remains separate and requires FIRs where penal provisions are attracted.
She also rejected claims that the regulations are meant only for SC, ST or OBC communities. “Both the 2012 and 2026 regulations cover all axes of discrimination under Article 15,” she said, including gender, religion, disability and place of birth.
She further said that many of the protests were happening because people are scared about the misuse of the new guidelines. She pointed out that every law is prone to misuse, but “we are a society that believes in justice, and every law has its safeguards.”
“That doesn’t mean you do away with it,” she added.
The matter is now back before the apex court, but Wadekar said that the central issue remains unchanged.
“The regulations were never about punishment; they were about prevention,” she said.
For her, the litigation continues to raise a constitutional question: whether the right to equality in higher education can exist without enforceable institutional safeguards — or whether, without them, it remains only a promise on paper.
