In April, the Supreme Court cleared the way for the University Grants Commission to implement its long-awaited Promotion of Equity in Higher Education Institutions Regulations, 2025. Heralded as a progressive leap toward institutional justice, the notification came in the wake of decades of systemic caste discrimination and months after a powerful legal petition led by Radhika Vemula and Abeda Tadvi, the mothers of Rohith Vemula and Payal Tadvi, whose suicides laid bare the entrenched violence of caste in India’s universities. While the legal sanction is welcome, some lingering questions haunt the academic corridors: how far can a notification go? How might the proposed national caste survey contribute in uprooting these deep social hierarchies within higher education?

The UGC’s new regulations are not merely bureaucratic rewordings of older, toothless guidelines. For the first time, non-compliance comes with tangible consequences, such as funding cuts, potential derecognition, and mandatory Equity Committees with SC/ST and female representation. Additionally, a National Task Force on student suicides and mental health is to oversee the policy’s implementation. However, the caution raised by Indira Jaising, senior advocate for the petitioners, is pertinent. By clubbing caste discrimination with other forms of abuse like ragging, bullying, and sexual harassment, the regulation risks masking the specificity and structural depth of caste-based exclusion. Earlier drafts had explicitly named practices like the denial of caste certificates, humiliation during viva exams, and withdrawal of fellowships as indicators of caste violence in campuses. Their quiet omission is not merely a redaction; it’s a political retreat.

This is where the proposed caste survey can act as a powerful complement. If implemented with political will and academic integrity, the survey could provide the data necessary to both expose and confront caste injustices that regulations alone cannot address.

A comprehensive caste survey would offer updated, disaggregated data on educational attainment, socio-economic background, dropout rates, and institutional representation of SCs, STs, OBCs, and other marginalised communities. This allows for a far more targeted equity framework that revisits reservation policies, reevaluates the creamy layer within OBCs, and builds support mechanisms. For example, what if universities had to publish ‘diversity dashboards’, transparently displaying the representation of caste groups among students, faculty, and administrators? What if grievance redressal mechanisms were not generic but rooted in lived caste-based vulnerabilities? Data can shame institutions into action and guide them toward corrective interventions. Currently available data are shocking: a 2021 study found that 70% of Dalit and Adivasi students in IITs faced caste-based discrimination; between 2015 and 2019, only 1.6% of PhD seats at IIT Bombay went to ST candidates.

Curricular change is another space where regulation and survey findings must work together. Caste cannot continue to be taught as a relic of India’s feudal past. It must be addressed as a living, breathing system of inequality. Equally urgent is the diversification of faculty. The invisibility of SC/ST/OBC faculty in elite institutions denies marginalised students mentors who understand their lives and aspirations.

At the heart of institutional resistance to regulation and survey lies the sanctified notion of ‘merit’. However, ‘merit’, as sociologists and even the Supreme Court have acknowledged, is often caste privilege in disguise. The caste survey can challenge the myth head-on by exposing how access to quality schooling, preparatory coaching, and academic networks is deeply unequal.

The caste survey isn’t without risks. Data can be weaponised and misused. But these are not reasons to abandon the survey. The 2025 UGC notification and the proposed caste survey, one offering legal legitimacy, the other empirical clarity, are both necessary.

P. John J. Kennedy is former professor and dean, Christ (Deemed to be) University, Bengaluru